


The Swingin' Party

by thephoenixwitch



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - No My Chemical Romance, Alternate Universe - Punk, Coming of Age, Counterculture, DIY, Goth Gerard Way, Husker Du, M/M, Members of Fall Out Boy, Mentioned Hayley Williams, Pre-Hiatus (Fall Out Boy), Punk, Punk Frank Iero, Revenge Era Frank Iero, Revenge Era Gerard Way, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge Era, Twin City Indie Rock, Underground, subculture, the replacements - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:56:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 38,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23938777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thephoenixwitch/pseuds/thephoenixwitch
Summary: In the autumn of 1985, high school senior Frank Iero meets a Gerard-- an enigmatic, raven-haired and pale boy with a penchant for comics (and the only person with a record collection more impressive than Frank's.) Between the two of them, there's enough emotional baggage to go around. But between bruised knuckles and grimy punk shows and the clutches of near-adulthood, they're determined to make it all work out in the end.Content warning for bullying, use of homophobic slurs and some physical violence.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Comments: 8
Kudos: 41





	1. Nervous Breakdown

I was eleven years old when I decided I hated the kind of life the billboards try to tell you you're destined to live.

The years started to pile on top of each other until that point, just this growing tumor of societal expectations and the fear of what the hell I was supposed to become that I wouldn't hate; so eventually it just struck me all at once that I just wasn't going to take it. There was a way out and I was going to find it or go insane trying.

It took me a couple years, but eventually I found it, and I knew I wasn't ever letting go.

That's what punk does to you, if you digest it the way you're supposed to: it pulls you in and it just lets all the boundaries and fears go, putting all the anger and confusion and sadness into this merciless music that doesn't care if it's harsh, doesn't care if it's not accepted by masses or billboards. It was the first time I had ever felt like something had clicked for me, like I actually belonged somewhere.

It happened when I snuck into a show I knew nothing about, out of sheer curiosity to see a band I'd never heard of-- and at the time, not many others had, either.

There's not a lot of thirteen year olds who stumble into Husker Du gigs in the dull breeze of Minneapolis in May, but that spring of 1980 was what ended up changing my life beyond what I could've ever predicted as I stepped into the venue.

You could hear the music from the street, and without hardly any thought at all I followed the sound into the bar, feedback and applause and the sound of pure energy unlike anything I'd felt before pouring into my awareness.

It was insane, and I was addicted from that first second.

I didn't know anyone in the bar, any of the guys up on the stage, but I'd grow to find myself in this community and worship these bands. Through them I'd find a voice and make music of my own to play on stages that were smaller but every bit as gorgeous as the rest.

And in the process, all hell would break loose, too. But whatever.

***

"Listen, you think I've got plans that exceed five minutes from now? Since when have I ever been anyone you could rely on, Frank, I don't really know why this is so shocking to you."

"It's...it's not. I'm not surprised, I'm just pissed."

There's nothing but the sound of Bert lighting another cigarette on the other end, the click of the lighter and the swift noise of him exhaling to kill.

"'Sorry," he says blankly. When I realize he's not going to hang up first, I have to take a deep breath to keep from slamming the telephone back into the receiver.

Today marks the second consecutive time-- and several dozenth time in the last few years-- that Bert has decided he is too cool for a show, instead opting to go around bumming alcohol off of college students and going god knows where with god knows who. This afternoon, though, is especially pissed-off-warranting: very unlike my social circle, approximately none of my friends are coming along. Everyone's got an excuse, a better gig or a better idea altogether, or they're just too damn lazy holed up getting high or sleeping through the whole day. In a way, they're all right: I shouldn't want to skip other, more useful opportunities to go to see some tiny high school band tear up some local punk house's basement, like maybe actually go to the Longhorn bar and see the Talking Heads, not that I've ever been much into them to begin with; but I promised Ryan I'd be there to watch them play, and something about the music they create makes me feel like I did the first time I began this whole life.

I get sentimental like that. Not very convenient, but it makes for good songwriting.

So here goes the misfit with plenty of acquaintances like Bert but little in the way of actual friends who give a shit, preparing to head to another gig alone. Lovely. I figure no one's going to give me much hell for my clothing options at a show run by disillusioned sophomores and juniors, and it's not like I'm going to run into many people in my grade to talk to or pretend to care enough to impress; so I throw on a Black Sabbath shirt and make my way out in a worn out jacket. Everything's fine, seriously.

It's starting to rain, but I actually don't add that to my list of reasons today is turning out to suck. I can deal with rain. It washes away some of the weight that the universe tosses onto your shoulders whenever it's bored.

Due to the fact that I woke up to discover a dead cassette player and no batteries in sight, I just walk in silence. No Bob Mould or Henry Rollins to keep me company, but that's also something I can deal with: sometimes when you're a person with a thirst for chaos, it can surprise you how far a little quiet can go.

***

_"If you can't determine differences between_

_Reagan and a tyrant, that's 'cause they're_

_the same damn thing!"_

The opening act is young-- literally freshman-- and loud. They're pretty fucking good, in spite of what they lack in subtlety. 

Starting things out with blunt politics is always a surefire to get the crowd going, and tonight's definitely no exception, even if it is in other ways: I'm seeing a lot more than just the punk kids here, and depending on who you ask that's either a really good thing or a really bad one.

I think I belong to the former, though. It's kind of nice to have everyone from goths to geeks to hippies in this place tonight. There's a common thread connecting us all here for a reason.

Most likely this is the case because Ryan's band isn't really just hardcore. They're a lot of things all at once, which is why they're making such a scene around here (which is pretty damn hard, because Minneapolis is to punk as Bowie is to face paint.) No one really knows what to call them, but for now that's okay. The music means something that matters to a whole lot of us, and that's the bottom line before anything else.

"Thanks, so, this is a lot of people for a shitty high school band, eh?"

Ryan and company take the stage. Brent does some weird tuning checks on his bass, the sounds giving off a creepy Sonic Youth kind of vibe into the crowded atmosphere.

They're all these kind of artsy kids with their curtains of hair hanging in their faces, faded out T-shirts and jeans from at least the 70s. The moment soundcheck ends, Jon turns up the amp on his guitar and starts with the riff. The crowd gains its momentum back. The universe is back in balance the second Ryan attacks the microphone with a kind of intensity that seems to rely more on the sharp edge of emotion than the pure weight of aggression.

The crowd spirals into a joyful kind of frenzy, sweaty bodies slamming into each other in a messy kind of mosh pit as we ignore the shock waves of impact and let the adrenaline take over. That's the best part of going to see a show, when everyone settles into the spirit of things and sets themselves free. I could stay here forever, which is my thought at virtually every time I go to one of these. It's as important to me as breathing.

_"If we're all animals, what's the point in presidents and philosophy?"_

The drums are reeling along with the wild chords. Everything's perfect, and I'm home, even if none of my friends are here to help me feel more like a person and less like a out-of-orbit satellite. Ryan's lyrics are trippy as hell yet every sentence feels like it makes sense on this deeper level inside of you.

_"How do I ask for more porridge when they're aren't any spoons and nobody's got ears?"_

_"What's the meaning of your mindset times mine? Anarchy, or something else pointless!"_

The set finishes with Ryan slamming the mic to the floor, a swell of cheers emerging from the constant buzz of yelling and the usual. As the next band prepares to set up, people scatter to talk or take a smoke break.

My head's still reeling from the intensity of the show, despite having done this for years. It never gets old, and I can feel that it never feel as I step out into the too-chilly April to light a cigarette. The sky is gray, and I almost flip it off for no reason before I stop myself. That's far too cliche, some punk kid flipping off the sky. The sky isn't the one fucking us over, anyway.

Maybe we can call out the sky on being a bystander, though.

The air becomes warm in front of me, the tiny orange flame pricking the paper cylinder and leaving me to sigh in relief. Not a good habit, and the last thing I should be doing is giving more money to assholes in suits for another useless thing that kills you in the end, but life's too short to regret shit, and once you're dead you won't have to think about what you should or shouldn't have done with it for any longer.

So I'm under the sky, alone, for the millionth time. I've gotten used to it enough to like it, but I'm too much of a introspective romantic to get tired of it just yet.

I'm snapped out of the trance, though, by something else.

"C'mon, it's pointless, man. It's okay."

A voice pleads for someone to come back inside the venue.

"Seriously, please- oh God, don't do this to yourself. He's fine."

A few feet away from the sparse sort of crowd that's gathered out here in waiting, I see it. A girl with black pigtails and a very school kid-esq aesthetic is trying to coax her friend away from the cold, back into the basement, away from where they're scanning the perimeter with this expression that's verging on fear. My first thought blares _panic attack,_ as if I wouldn't know plenty about those, but who knows.

Despite her pleading, the friend remains where he's standing. I see him shake his head, the only thing he says to her being something inaudible before the girl shakes her head and follows another guy with frizzed brown locks inside the house.

The lot's starting to clear up, cigarettes stomped out and boots re-laced. Soon enough, this guy's nearly the only person left outside, and I can hear soundcheck beginning back inside.

I'm not as shy as I used to be, thanks to the scene, but I'm still not one who just talks to strangers out of the blue. Apparently my head decides to fuck its own conventions, however, and I'm walking over to where he stands, rigid, his raven hair shrouding his face and his long black coat pulled tightly around him.

I sort of stumble over my words before I can get them out of my mouth. He pretends not to notice.

"Um...you okay?" I begin. Needless to say, this is starting off pretty uncomfortable.

His eyes blink rapidly, suddenly wide.

And then he runs like a maniac.


	2. Cities In The Dust

I don't follow him. At first I don't, anyway.

It's when I see what's causing him to run across the street in absolute panic that I realize what's happening. I almost don't believe it, how quickly the whole thing's spiraling at once, but I've seen my fair share of this.

You don't stand out and expect not to get knocked down by assholes who don't understand it. I found that out a long time ago. Right now, though, there's no time to think about anything besides what's happening right in front of me.

Because across the road, there's a kid getting beat behind a restaurant.

Whoever this guy is, he's not going to make it out of this thing with a good ending to tell. He's not much taller than I am, and I'm pretty damn short, so go figure. Him against two six-foot-something jackasses behind the dumpster at some fast food place is not going to end well, and despite the fact my skinny ass isn't much help, my instinct tells me to run, too.

I don't know how he knew this was going to happen, or who any of these people are, but the faces barely register in my mind as people who go to my school, him included. Great. Scholarly conflict and some new local enemies. Perfect way to finish off this previously anticlimactic day.

The mystery boy in the coat that unwittingly dragged me into this sees me behind him, and almost stops dead in his tracks. Ahead of us, the guys in the back of the building see us.

"Should I-- should I fucking call the cops or something, or go get someone inside?" I try to offer, stuttering. The boy gives me a look of something between fear and apology, and just shakes his head as he runs over the scene.

So this is the story, evidently, of how I get into my first fight.

Nice.

There's the sound of fist making contact to jaw, and before it happens a second time I'm kicking one of the attackers in the shins, starting to regret my whim decision to help out with whatever the fuck is going on here. I nearly get sucker punched, but luckily I haven't stoned out my reflexes to the point I can't kick this dude's fist. Basically, kicking is the only thing I have to offer right now, but at least it seems to be working well enough.

"What the fuck, faggot?"

Obviously, my presence is a surprise to these regional boneheads.

I ignore this, and that's when the mystery boy shoves the victim away, yelling. "Run, Mikey, Jesus Christ--"

The kid looks about fourteen, maybe fifteen. A wave of nausea hits me. These fuck faces could be older than me, for all I know, and they've punched a black eye and no doubt a dozen other bruises into this kid.

Did I mention that I fucking hate people?

I feel the punch to the side of my head almost delayed, because I'm caught up in all the motion that's going on. It occurs to me that now would be a great time to run away, but that's before this guy's fist is crashing into my right cheekbone. The hit staggers a little, making the edge of his knuckles dig into my skin before the release, and then the inevitable happens. Some sadistic Republican lawyer's son has me trapped under his arms, and by the looks of things I'm not going to be able to get out before this gets exponentially worse.

Slam, another punch to the face for their new Faggot™ of choice. I love life.

Translucent blurs are starting to paint the edge of my line of vision, and I'm actually contemplating whether throwing up would be a useful or dumb move. I certainly have the capacity to at the moment.

Holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit

Needless to say, I've reached full breakdown mode by now. Nowhere to go, nothing to do about this, maybe I could knock myself out now if I lurched toward the pavement hard enough?

"Hey, what the fuck are you doing? I will call the goddamn cops! I'm calling the police, do you hear me?"

Ah, yes. The establishment pulls through for an ex machina. Priceless. A woman in a pantsuit and an expensive-looking actual cellular phone stares at the scene in shock, her threat doing the job.

Just like that the guy lets go of me, and before I can process anything that's just happened I'm running away.

I don't think, I don't look. I run.

The air is biting into me, and I've all but forgotten about any basement shows or bands or skies. All I can feel is the panic that's stabbing into my veins, the knowledge that as soon as they get the chance those fuckers'll catch up to us and finish what they started. I'm actually sick. I'm physically sick. I'm gonna pass out--

"Hey!"

I slow down, trying to get a grip on my surroundings.

The boy in the coat from the show, panting as he crouches to catch his breath. He looks up at me, and can see the eyeliner smudged over his piercing eyes. I collect all the memories of the past five minutes, all while trying not to keel over.

"Hey," he repeats, staring at me intently.

"...Yeah?"

"Thank you." He means it.

I want to say something back, but that's when we hear the rustling, and realize we'd better fucking run. We exchange a look of terror, and pretty much silently agree to do just that. It's frenzied, a little zig-zagged since I'm half out of my brain, but whatever it is, it manages to get us out into the exhausted suburban apartment complexes again. It's definitely not a lot of fun, what with punch wounds and the background noises of homophobic/brainless/etc violence sluts possibly following us for the first few seconds, but it works.

"So...this is your place?" I ask. At this point, you could say I've been a bit better.

The boy nods, and the kid from earlier-- who is obviously his brother, peeks out of the front door to make brief eye contact with us and disappear.

"Yeah. I think I know you from science," the boy finally says awkwardly.

"Oh?"

He's right. Mysterious coat boy is in my science class, the class in which I talk to nobody. Hey, did you ever notice how blurry the sky is when you're about to lose consciousness? The clouds just melt. It's sky soup.

Ha. Soup.

It's great.

"Yeah. I'm Gerard. I forgot your name though, sorry."

I want to tell him that's perfectly fine, given that I never even knew his to begin with, but that's about when I faint.

***

"Goddamn it!"

"Stop trying to do things you suck at, Mikey. It's quite simple."

"Oh, screw off, Gee."

There's a very interesting sort of argument going on, clearly, and looks like I've missed the context.

The first thing I notice when I wake up is the ceiling. It's beige, it has a bumpy plaster finish, like little outlines of fireworks going off above you. It's not a bad way to wake up.

And that's when the pain hits.

My face feels like it would be better if I just peeled it off and pulled out all my bones in the process, honestly. The black eye on my right side is swollen partially shut, there's clearly some messy shit going on in my general ribcage area, and apparently my stomach has decided it's going to feel like it was stabbed multiple times with the blunt end of a hammer.

When my memory decides to show up, I groan.

This causes something in the kitchen to clatter, and a shadow to appear over my figure, which is sprawled out over a sagging couch.

"Holy shit, I'm-- why did you do that? I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry--" this is the voice of the younger brother, Mikey.

"Just leave him alone, alright?"

And that would be Gerard. I try to roll over so I can actually face them, but trying to move is about as bad as ideas come at the moment. I wince.

"How long have I been out and what the hell is going on, now?"

Mikey snorts, then abruptly stops when Gerard elbows him roughly.

"I tried to make mac n cheese. It probably sucks, but you're welcome to have some, since you kind of sacrificed your general well-being for us," Mikey continues. He pushes his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose, looking at me almost like he's intimidated by this older, weirdly dressed kid in the middle of their living room. Don't know why, since I pretty much look like a short-ass geek in a leather jacket.

Maybe not the weirdly dressed part, now that I think about it. After all, his older brother's decked out in some serious goth stuff, which I'm guessing is the case all the time. He gave off that kind of brooding aesthetic, anyway, but in the lamplight of some run-down apartment living room he's decidedly less enigmatic. I could probably relate to him a more than a few levels, really.

"This is incredibly weird and I'm really sorry I got involved in this shit," I mumbled out, my voice raspy and unfamiliar.

"Why? You were trying to help save some kid's ass without even knowing who he was, that's a pretty decent thing to do, don't you think?" It's Gerard's turn to speak, and Mikey rolls his eyes at his apathetic choice of language in describing him. He speaks a little quieter than his brother, more calculated. I curse myself mentally for immediately thinking that this is kind of hot, in a subtle abstract guy-I-just-properly-met kind of way. Apparently I have a thing for goth dudes now, what else is new? Oh yeah, my ribs literally feel like they've been ground to powder. All is well.

My internal trainwreck is interrupted by Mikey sprinting into the kitchen to attend to his disastrous macaroni experiment, and so it's just me and Gerard, resident kind-of-hot-goth-kid-from-science.

"I think I screwed things up for you, really," I mutter. "That lady was the one who saved our skin."

"Maybe. But it's the thought that counts, right?" Gerard offers. He's distractedly focused on my lip ring, which by some force of the gods wasn't ripped out or pounded into my already split lip in the course of the lovely encounter from earlier. I find it odd he doesn't have any piercings of his own, since he seems like the kind of person to have plenty, and for some reason my brain decides this is something I should say out loud.

Gerard laughs. Lightly, quietly, but it's still there nonetheless.

"I hate needles more than Reagan," he says, a bit more serious. "I'm a horror slut who can't stand the thought of my blood being infiltrated by a tiny piece of metal, go figure."

Surprisingly, this does make me laugh. Which isn't great, since my ribs aren't too keen on that right now.

"Fuck. Um, so, I'm starting to regret ever being born," I admitted, gesturing towards my situation. Gerard grimaces. "I don't think you broke anything. And we should probably call your parents, or whatever..."

"My parents don't really give a shit."

Gerard raises an eyebrow.

"Well, I mean, my dad's left us alone to jack around somewhere halfway across the country most of the time since my birth, and my mom's got enough what with like, three jobs. I'm good. Though I'm guessing you probably want me out of your home."

Gerard is obviously taken aback by this bluntness, but who isn't? He stares at the carpet, uncomfortable.

"No no no, it's-- it's fine. Really. I feel genuinely guilty. Our parents are gone most of the time anyway, so just stay here as long as you want, I guess." He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. "Seriously."

I nod, slowly, considering my options. Judging by my current state, it looks like I have no choice but to take up on that offer.

***

Mikey's attempt at boxed pasta actually isn't half bad.

I basically tell Gerard that no, I am not going to eat mac n cheese on their couch like some random freeloader, so thanks to my stubbornness I end up dragging myself up and over to their rickety kitchen table. It's another bad idea, but oh well. I'll deal with the painful consequences later.

So here we are, three high school misfits gathered in some dingy kitchen in some dingy suburb, buried deep within the recesses of this dingy universe with infinite stars in every direction. While this isn't a scenario I was anticipating or would ever voluntarily be in, it could be a worse. A lot fucking worse. I could've been pummeled to death by those teenage sadists, maybe mugged on the way home from the show if none of this had happened; who knows. But it's alright.

Gerard watches me with interest, then blinks and looks back down.

It could be a lot worse.


	3. Brave Men Run (In My Family)

Everything is cliche until it happens in real life, and right now I'm okay with that.

I'm okay with a lot of things, really, including the fact that as I make my way down the hall from where I slept in the living room, I can hear singing filtering from the bathroom.

_"Bring your own lampshade, somewhere there's a party,"_

The voice is sharp and soft, controlled yet ruthless at the same time. It's completely something of its own, and I immediately know who these notes belong to.

Damn, I need to talk more to other awkward kids in my classes.

_"Here it's never ending, can't remember when it started,_

_Pass around the lampshade, there'll be plenty enough room in jail..."_

I don't want to seem weird as fuck just standing in the cold hallway listening to a guy I just formally met sing in the shower, but Gerard's voice is way too compelling for me to just pretend like this isn't happening. I have a thing for interesting voices, the way they wrap around your chest and find pressure points in the fibers of yourself you didn't even know existed, or that you needed to be found until then. Paul Westerberg's voice is definitely one of those, and his songs-- one of which is currently carrying through the hallway-- are the kind that really capture that strangeness.

Still, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I already think I like Gerard's better.

Eventually I move on, crawling back into the blankets on the couch for fear of just rummaging around their kitchen for breakfast. My jacket's draped over the arm of the sofa, and I mutter a few curses to myself when I see the missing buttons in the aftermath of the little encounter yesterday. I didn't really have the time to examine it last night, but in the course of those lovely five or so minutes, both my Bad Brains and Minor Threat pins have managed to disappear from the worn out denim. I'll have to scour around to see if I have any others, because the good news is that I likely do. I collect a lot of random music-related shit, for better or for worse.

A few minutes later Gerard appears, sporting a Bauhaus T-shirt and a tight black jeans. There's deep shadow and liner spread across his eyes, sort of as they were yesterday but with even more flair this time. I immediately think of Robert Smith, maybe with much neater hair and better lipstick application skills.

"So...you're feeling a little better?" he asks, nodding to my much more casual sitting position.

I nod, shrugging. "I'm not too great, but I'm fine. Um." I look down at the ground, seeing the ragged carpet and his heavily buckled combat boots, my awkwardness in full motion once more. "You like The Replacements?"

Gerard just smiles a little, blushing slightly under all the smooth pale makeup.

"Who doesn't?" he asks shyly, and he's right. This is Minneapolis, and if you have any affinity for music with guitars in it whatsoever, you're a Replacements fan.

"Their new album isn't their best, I mean, to me. But you're-- well, you sung that really well. Like...I don't even know what to say. Seriously, do you sing in a band or something?"

He blushes a little harder, shaking his head.

"I've thought about it. I just...I don't know. Not much of a social person, if you know what I mean. Anyway, you seem like you have a pretty cool taste in music, even if you just sort of dissed the masterpiece that is _Tim_ ," he offers. "Anyone at a show like last night's got to be."

I grin. "I'm a pretty pathetic person, yeah, but at least I have a killer music taste. And ditto, even though I don't really know much about Bauhaus," I admit.

"Well. I don't know much about the Dead Kennedys, either, so maybe we I'll show you Siouxsie and Joy Division if you school me on Black Flag and Stiff Little Fingers." He grins back at me, both of us gaining a little more confidence. I laugh, the offer in truth sounding like a better idea than anything else I could possibly do at the moment.

"Well. We're going to have to get out some cassettes, then."

It's a crazy idea, but that doesn't really stop crazy people like me. And I can tell he's got that good crazy in him, too.

***

"So. The Cure, _Three Imaginary Boys_ , 1979. The LP that started it all, even if Robert was pretty pissed about the record label messing with it, so they released _this,"_ Gerard says, setting down the pink cassette case and pulling out an LP adorned with paper palm trees and electric colors.

" _Boys Don't Cry._ The quintessential album of, well, anything ever."

It's not long before we're making our way through the discography of various bands ranging from death rock to post-punk to something in between or outside of the realm of genre categorization. Gerard's music interests are pretty eclectic, but I was right about him being all but goth as hell. Dark, eccentric, weird music that fills up the whole room and makes you feel like you're not even on the same planet anymore. It's a lot more dramatic than what I'm used to, but in a way that feels enigmatic rather than overblown like a hair band or some shit. Some of it I've heard a little of, some I had literally no idea existed until now, but you can see it in Gerard's eyes that music really just _clicks_ for him. For some people, it's a life-long love affair that defines culture as a whole through the lens of your perspective. For others, it literally is our life.

Most of the albums are familiar little cheap cassettes with macabre and strange covers and equally elusive music within them, although on occasion he pulls out a full LP and drops the needle carefully on the inky vinyl, chewing on his lip as it falls and the crackling begins.

Gerard's room is small but aptly decorated; there's a bunch of old horror movie and band posters stuck to the wall, some unlit candles and various macabre knick knacks. In the corner a collection of comics lies tucked in a dusty bookshelf, the rest spilling over the edge of cardboard boxes. By Gerard's appearance-- and personality, too, even if we're still only acquaintances at this point-- this room seems to fit him well.

At one point he pulls out a tape entitled _Bad Moon Rising._ On the cover is a sprawling scarecrow, its jack 'o lantern head ablaze against a city skyline. Something it about looks like Halloween and acid trips all blurred into one crystal clear atmosphere.

"You ever heard the Sonic Youth?"

I shake my head. "I've heard a little bit, to be honest, but not a lot. I'm surprised you're into them."

Gerard smiles, opening the tape case and sticking the cassette in the player. "They're from NYC, where there's this whole no-wave thing going on, these artists just totally rebelling against anything that's ever been done before. It's chaotic and it's creepy and I think I'm in love."

The opening notes sound out in a wavering tone, atonal and melodic all at once. I don't even know what tuning it's supposed to be, but that's the point. I don't know if I'm hearing the musical equivalent of a sunrise or a sunset, but something's happening and it feels important.

"Damn," I mutter. He laughs, looking at me timidly under his curtain of hair as he watches my gradual reaction.

_Seven days and seven nights_

_I dreamt a sailor's dream at sea_

_Seven days and seven nights_

_I dreamt a sailor's dream of me_

The sounds are almost overwhelming, striking a chord inside my chest I didn't even know was there, like all good music does.

This whole time we're listening, I can see the expression on Gerard's face: his eyes closed, head forward, breathing like he's taking in the songs with the air. Periodically, he looks up to gauge my take on it, but I don't really think my opinion matters at all. He's got something special that works for him, which is what we all try to achieve. His soundscape is something completely his own, and whatever I feel about it is irrelevant-- even if it just so happens I love it, too.

I don't see the point in going home, especially since I'm in little condition to brave the walk that far, but inevitably the question comes up. We've managed to get lost in the music, rarely moving if only to eat or occasionally converse with Mikey, who goes in and out of the house throughout the day. By afternoon, it's unavoidable.

"Um. So have you called your mother or anything?" Gerard begins awkwardly as he slips a Depeche Mode tape back in its case. I sigh, thinking that I've got a little while before she thinks there's something wrong. I'm nearly eighteen and I have a tendency to slip off with friends at any given moment, so she's come to expect me gone half the time when she returns from work at night. A part of me is guilty because of this, but at least she can be at peace alone without some useless teenager tentatively sitting around the apartment.

We stand up, leaving the stacks of tapes and LPs in our wake, me wincing pretty hard at the sudden jolt of movement. My chest still feels like it's on fucking fire, thank you.

"Yeah, I'll see if she can come pick me up when she gets off her job," I said, though not without gritting my teeth a little in the process as I walk slowly.

Gerard puts an arm around me, helping to steady the whole painstaking deal with this whole walking concept. I mutter a quiet thank you, very aware of his touch.

Anyway, it comes down to this: I've overstayed my boundaries, I've spent a night at a (previously, but whatever) stranger's house as a result of a situation I shouldn't have been in and had little help dealing with, and now it's time to go home. Yeah, I would think that's the rational thing to do.

We go into the kitchen, where the telephone sits slightly crooked on its receiver, the wire twisted and dented every few coils. Gerard just shrugs and gives me the go ahead, so I pick it up and start dialing. As I'm doing this I can see he looks almost disappointed.

"You want me to leave, right?" I ask, laughing a little.

He grins again, that smile that feels almost familiar, like the way it was last night when we were all talking at dinner or when we were lost in his music together.

Finally, he simply says, "Well. You definitely don't have to."

This is when it clicks: we've seen some kind of connection, some mutuality in each others' company, and it wasn't a fluke. Between the events of yesterday evening and now, we've managed to find something among the aftermath of all that went down.

Again: I don't have much in the way of friends, or at least those who are genuine about it.

I shake my head, though, because I've got an idea.

***

My mother is a decent person, and even when I was at the height of my anger and confusion about who I was and why things had to be the way they were, I knew that.

Anyone who could've looked in on the situation, any of the clean and neat suburban kids who had top lockers and prom dates and something kind of like normality-- they'd see the stereotype of the careless single mother, the girl who was too young to have a kid and lived too messy a life to raise him.

I think that's bullshit, though. It's not my mother's fault the system's fucked.

For as long as I can remember she's worked countless jobs paying the rent and getting us fed, sifting through the judgement of people who told her she had no business trying to support herself, much less me. She's never really been there a lot, I guess, and despite the fact she's mostly left me to my own devices growing up, you can see in her expression the way she cares. It's just hard for us to express it most of the time, with everything going on around us.

I used to be upset, quietly, that she wasn't around much, as a kid-- and when I got into junior high I started to get frustrated, sometimes a little broken about not having a parent or some kind of adult figure to compensate for all my questions and loneliness, but eventually I just hit a point where I stopped caring. I was self-sufficient, I'd grown up with my own company and time to think about a lot of shit, and at least I hadn't grown up hungry most nights. It could be worse.

It could be a lot worse, I told myself, but I tried to keep the whole guilt thing to a minimum. You can only blame yourself for the way society's screwed us all over for so long.

I think Gerard knows some of what this is like. They're not exactly in a plentiful part of the city, to put it simply, and you get the sense that he and Mikey have grown up alone, too. Still, you can see that he's a bit surprised to see exactly how exhausted my mother is when, mercifully, she agrees to come get me.

Or us, should I say, because so far I haven't yet fulfilled my end of the music-trading bargain.

Anyway- Mom's eyes look sunken with the brushstrokes of lilac underneath them, her posture hung over the steering wheel with tiredness. Despite all of this, she gives a sort of welcoming nod Gerard's way, and we climb in the back of the old sedan.

There's some brief hellos exchanged before silence envelops the car, the streets humming under the wheels. Surprisingly, it's Mom that finally breaks that silence.

"You all got beat up by some guys, is that right? I swear, back a few years ago there were some kids getting bloodied up behind the park and someone eventually called the cops on them. You're lucky that didn't happen, I suppose. I'm sorry, both of you, but Frank, please take care of yourself," she finishes, gesturing towards the bandages visible on my arm. "Going to be the death of me, really, it hurts me physically to see you like that. Really."

Like I said-- she does care some, even if she shouldn't be able to afford to. I'm worried she's gonna bring up more details if we don't change the subject. I figured I might as well just spit out the truth. There's nothing she'd have the energy to do, even if she could. At the end of the day, she doesn't deserve this kind of drama to begin with.

"It wasn't that big of a deal, really, we're fine," I mumble, to which Gerard nods in agreement, reassuring my mother that we've already gotten over the consequences of it. Maybe my rib cage hasn't, but on the bright side the pain starts to dull when you get used to it.

Still feels like fire, but maybe slightly-less-aggressive fire. I can deal.

When we get out of the car I don't know how to feel about what's happening: on the one hand, some guy I just recently met is now standing in front of the cramped and ancient apartment complex I call home, which I'm not exactly proud of-- but on the other hand, I don't think he's judging me. I feel as if I can trust him, oddly enough.

So we just go inside. And everything is okay.

My mother profusely apologizes for the mess, clearly embarrassed, but Gerard just chuckles and says he can relate. My mom's definitely not used to visitors, and it shows. I can't really blame her.

There's not much to see in here-- the kitchen, the peeling wallpaper, a couch in the corner with a small television. We've moved around different apartments a lot over the years, but so far we've stuck with this one for nearly two. It's got a bad AC and creaky floorboards, but it's been a lot kinder to us than many other homes have been.

Once we've tucked ourselves away in my bedroom, I just kind of look around, shrugging to Gerard anticlimactically.

"So. This is it, I guess," I tell him. Some gig flyers posted to the walls, fanzines and some pins and odds and ends scattered around. I've got my copy of _Howl_ sitting on my nightstand, to which I see Gerard smile to himself.

"You like Ginsberg?" he asks. I nod, matter of fact. "Who doesn't?"

"People who hate poetry. And straight guys," he jokes, and I feel myself turning a light shade of red, but he just grins at me, sharing his secret, too. I don't talk to people often about my sexuality, but when I do it's a nice change. And it's even nicer when you have someone like you to talk to about it.

Another mental note that I need to talk to people more.

We end up on the floor again, this time in a different place with different music, but the same feeling of connection as I put in my copy of Husker Du's _Zen Arcade_ into the player, the heavy silence before the first song starts an eternity before the familiar drum beat begins. The bass kicks in, then the mercilessness of the distorted guitar.

_Something I learned today_

_Black and white is always gray_

_Looking through the windowpane_

_I'm not inside your brain, your brain_

The vocals tear into the atmosphere with raw emotion, the way it's supposed to be. I get goosebumps listening to a record I've hear a million times over, just because that's the affect it has. In only a little over a year since it's release it's become my favorite album of all time. I don't think I can completely explain it, but I don't think I need to, either. Some things you just feel, and that's enough.

Which is something I know Gerard understands. He's got his eyes closed softly, his head back against the wall as he breathes in the music. I recognize the overwhelmed expression in his face, the good kind, the same as I had when I first heard this. He looks over at me, eyes now wide, mouthing a simple _wow_ in response to the music cascading all around us, tying us together.

He gets it.


	4. Disorder

School is a tradition, a system, a habit of society that ends up making everyone miserable and leaving the kids with out cash or popularity in the dust; but still, it has its perks.

For instance, sitting out in the parking lot trading zines and patches, music playing in the fought-over speakers, talking over the ugly hum of lawn mowers and car engines and everything in between while we take pride in our hour of freedom thanks to the existence of lunch period as a necessary component of your day. Maybe there's always going to be a kind of disassociation when I'm around people, but at least it's a decent time.

Today's different, though. The moment everyone I had any connection with left to gather outside, I was slipping into the art room on the third floor.

Inside is a completely different scene than that of the dull hallway lights outside; geeks and freaks all gathered around chatting fervently, music filtering out from the messy classroom- I recognize Sonic Youth from the records I was shown just a day ago. When I looked into the back corner of the room, I couldn't really stop myself from grinning.

Gerard waved me over, looking tired but otherwise recovered from the events of a couple days ago-- which seem like years ago, really, given everything between then and now. Mikey sits next to him, oblivious, head buried in a Batman comic. Beside them are several people, two of which I recognize as Gerard's friends from the show, the girl in black pigtails and the guy with his brown curls sticking out in every direction.

"Ah, okay, so you're the one he keeps going on about," the girl says, flipping me a casual wave. "Anyway, you've met my loser son already, I'm Lindsey." Gerard rolls his eyes, and I halfway suspect he's embarrassed about her revealing this, and I'm definitely surprised. Let's just put it these terms: there's no one who I'm close enough to that has any interest in "going on about" me, and I don't know if I should feel awkward for the fact I'm inevitably going to disappoint him or just a little warm that someone thinks that.

I decide to just go for the second option.

"So," Gerard begins, playfully poking Mikey's head up by his nose, causing him to drop the comic in surprise and give me a startled nod and something between a grimace and an apologetic smile. I don't blame him, I'd be reading Batman over social interaction any day. If he feels like he owes me something, he shouldn't, really.

Gerard ignores his younger brother's hasty attempts to acknowledge other humans and continues. "I think you may have seen at least one of them Saturday? Lindsey and Ray, I mean," he says, also gesturing to brow-haired dude. A guy with a sweep of blond hair in his face looks up and nods, introducing himself as Bob. Gerard shrugs. "Anyway, we're all nerds here, so welcome to the island of...uh, misfit toys, I guess."

"That's the single most cringe-inducing thing you've ever said," Lindsey remarks, rolling her eyes. "I think you're projecting your own dorkiness onto the rest of us, Gerard."

"Yeah, Gee, we're pretty damn punk, what the fuck man?" Bob jokes. "I'm offended, truly." He then swings his hair back in his face dramatically and continues flipping through a Dungeons and Dragons handbook. "No nerds here but you, kiddo."

Gerard flips him off, and the circle grows into some brief laughter. I don't exactly know what to do, so I just roll with it-- and despite the fact I'm obviously new to the whole dynamic, for some reason I feel like I belong, or at least could eventually belong.

Maybe I just need to hang out with more non-assholes like these. That's probably it.

Over the course of lunch I'm introduced to the entirety of the social circle: everyone here takes advantage of the free period Ms. Jacobson, the art teacher, has this hour, and since she doesn't mind, they've since made it home. It definitely beats the unreliable circumstances of crowding around in mass groups in the parking lot. As it turns out, Gerard's friends are in the same vein of cool and geeky that he is, the kind of people you'd expect to spend lunch in an art room. There's some more laid back about it, and way more genuine, too-- not that trading zines outside isn't every bit as real as it feels, but here everything goes. Everyone's best friends and nobody gives a shit about how lowly you think of yourself; they make you feel otherwise.

Eventually Gerard and I are sitting on the desk in the back, him looking like a kind of raven-boy with his legs crossed and his back hunched over, hair soft and cascading in his face. Open on his lap is a faux leather bound sketchbook, pencil and ink sketches of comic characters and panels of his own streaming across the pages.

"So...I don't. Well. Can I ask you something?" I venture as we look over the last few pages, the colors and lines splayed beautifully across the thick paper.

Gerard's clearly lost in thought, but he turns slowly at last.

"Is it so dramatically earth-shattering that you have to preclude it with permission to ask it?" he jokes, folding the sketches back closed and clutching the book to his chest.

"I just didn't know how much I should bring up about what happened, you know?"

He shrugs, sighs, looking as tired as ever.

"It's fine, honestly. It's my fault you got pulled into it, so I guess I owe you whatever explanation you want."

"That's--no, that's not what I meant. Sorry."

Still, Gerard looks apprehensive, avoiding eye contact, all the textbook symptoms of shyness with the added bonus of something else, something maybe a little more sinister.

I awkwardly touch his shoulder-- with my shitty skills at comforting and all-- immediately panicking and hoping I'm not making it all worse, but he doesn't flinch away; instead, he finally looks back.

So I just go with it.

"It all just happened so fast, y'know? It seemed so planned out, I mean obviously you were expecting it to happen, right?"

He says nothing, but I gauge his expression regardless. It's definitely past the line of nervousness by now.

"It was overwhelming, I mean. I'm still really confused, but I didn't-- you know, I didn't wanna pry."

Maybe misery is what's flashing behind Gerard's eyes. That would be it, yeah-- the way the hopelessness washes out all your anger so you just drown in it, quietly. I've been there. I still see it all the time, really, but that's the shit you're not supposed the talk about if you want to stay above the surface of everything.

According to every line of conformity drawn in this school and in this whole damn society, though, it doesn't matter. To plenty of people we're both freaks and, from what little Gerard has seemed to mention, faggots-- so they're not rooting for us anyway.

So, fuck it.

"How often do people do this shit, Gerard?"

I watch him swallow, breathing out a kind of shaky tension before he shrugs again, weaker but more jagged in the way he moves his hunched shoulders.

"I was just worried about him that night. Mikey. I was really fucking worried, and obviously I wasn't worried enough, right? Since it-- since it happened. God."

When you look over at Mikey you see a pretty normal looking geek of a kid, even if he's buried in his comics. But that's just it: it's like he's hiding, trying to disappear right behind the frames of his thick glasses, the thin shadow of a black eye underneath them.

Like he's thinking on the same plane, Gerard gazes over and tentatively brushes a finger over the lilac streak still on my cheekbone, observing it as his look of guilt only worsens. I hate myself for it, given the fact that now is definitely not the time, but I feel a shiver sputter around my spine at the touch. He looks practically devastated right now, and I'm starting to realize the magnitude of what I've just asked him.

"He was with friends. I don't trust people. It's pretty simple," he tells me quietly. "Some human beings do a shitty job of acting like ones."

I've been on the receiving end of bullies and sadists plenty of times-- it's virtually impossible not to be when you make the commitment to stand up and reveal yourself as separate from the decided norm in this place-- but Gerard is talking about something completely different, a level of torment I've never heard of firsthand; some people deal with shit, and some people go through teenage life stuck in a literal hell, courtesy of the cruelty of some assholes without souls.

I don't expect to be as angry as I am; I mean, I just saw the very edge of it all for myself forty-eight hours ago, but something in the depth of Gerard's expression hits a nerve.

"Gee?"

He shakes his head. "We're going to figure it out. We've managed to find back routes home and stuff, trust me, it's fine. I don't need you to get any more involved than you already are. I'm sorry, honestly."

The bell rings hollow, signaling the end of lunch, and he grabs his book bag. For the slightest moment I could've sworn he was about to cry, but he shows none of it now as he slings the strap over his shoulder.

The rest of the group disappears around the threshold of the door, until the only people left are the two of us and Mikey, who closes his book and looks at his brother expectantly. I start to wonder why the hell I felt like I was a part of this, their world, when all I did was barge into it.

It's not my world to be a part of, and as the room clears I take my stuff and let this sink in with a feeling I didn't expect would be so strong. The social circles, the bullies, the freaks and geeks and schools and subcultures-- it's all a huge mess of teenagers trying to find themselves, but so often it seems like we're all just pushing each other away. I curse myself for having the nerve to feel upset or sick about this, but the words Gerard muttered keep replaying in my head on a drowned out beat, and I'm angry. I shouldn't be angry, but I am. There's fucked up people who get off to tearing down anyone outside the standard, and the idea of this happening to him every day, another moment piling onto another, makes me want to throw up.

I don't have a place to get involved in this. I've already done enough damage.

The hallways start to flood with people again, and I close my eyes, exhausted. Back to the ugly side of the world.

Still, as I leave I see Mikey give a small wave, sheepish. He's trailed behind the rest of the group, the swarm of people shifting around each other among him.

Maybe I did make some difference.

***

Pete feigns a kick at the amp, rolling his eyes to the point of looking like a possessed spirit for a second.

"Fucking ancient. Honestly, he'd probably save more cash just replacing it than all the shit he does to keep it operating halfway right." He sighs, since at this point he's pretty much given up on getting Joe to buy new equipment. Until it breaks, Joe's playing it, and according to him the current setup is more than sufficient for this. Pete's already in a mood, due to both the characteristically awful Minnesota weather and me chickening out of another agreement to play an acoustic set here. It's been a long ass time, and if I want to make any money-- even if it's not much-- I need to start playing gigs again. I'm just not in my right mind to be songwriting of late, much less playing said songs for a crowd.

In the office (or the place that looks kind of like a rotting closet but technically is supposed to be an office) Sherrol's feet are crossed on top of the desk as she talks with yet another band trying to schedule a show on last-minute notice. For the ring leader of this place-- basically our own little Gilman street a la rundown house on the outskirts of downtown-- she's pretty laid back, but she won't spill her secret. I'd have torn my hair out a week into trying to schedule and run all this shit.

The door bursts open, the breeze rushing in as a short figure escapes the rain coming down at a concerning rate.

"I hate this city, you know that?" Patrick says as she shuts the door back, pulling off his soaked jacket and shivering.

"Hey, man, it least it has a decent taste in music, right?" Pete quips.

Patrick shrugs. "There's that, I guess."

More familiar faces join in the pre-show adventures, which mostly involve setting up equipment and milling around waiting for the actual fun to start. Tonight's supposed to be a pretty good show, since Pete's band is headlining; they've been around since we were all in middle school, and they've been working for a record deal for a while now. They definitely know how to make decent music, but at the end of the day, who here doesn't?

The last few hours of school passed uneventfully-- I didn't see anyone from lunch, much less Gerard. I was hoping that whatever snapped in the art room hadn't pushed him away, but I couldn't blame him. The last thing he needed was someone else fucking around with the mess in his life right now.

Maybe that's just how I see it.

Maybe I'm just an asshole.

I'm trying to push it back in my head, away from the pounding headache that's growing in my skull tonight. It's not working, exactly, but at least I have distractions at the moment.The venue slowly fills up, the familiar din back for the millionth time as we all huddle around preparing to mosh into each other for the sake of fellow teenagers screaming into microphones. It's a lot deeper and philosophical than it sounds, obviously.

The first couple acts are good, but the moment Patrick takes the stage, the energy intensifies to the ceiling. Pete, Joe, and Andy join him onstage with their respective instruments, Pete smirking like a motherfucker as he grips his bass, the little bat sticker glinting in the dim lights.

"So, uh. We're Patron Saint of Liars, and we all wanna die, but have a good time while it's busy happening."

Pete states this bluntly into the mic, and Joe slams the first chords into the crowded room.

This is my energy: it's my coffee, it's my drug, it's my sanity and insanity all at once: the way we all light up and slam into each other in our attempts to feel the music as best we can, sweat dripping and dust kicked around the ancient floors. I think I've made it pretty clear already, but just to remind you: I fucking live for these moments.

We're chanting the choruses back to Patrick, deafening.

Love, sex, death

'Till there's nothing left!

That's when the hand clasps onto my shoulder, and I spin around despite all the bodies crushing me into one place.

Lindsey's eyes are wide, but she's smiling. Sort of. Ish. The point, anyway, is that she's obviously got something to say, and before I can even think to come up with a proper hello she's beckoning me out of the gig.

This is a lot more than I had mentally prepared myself for, needless to say.

"Hey, I'm really sorry, but I need to--"-- someone knocks us a good few feet to the left, more bodies scattering--"--talk to you. I didn't wanna bother you, but this is-- this matters," she tells me over the sound that waves inside our heads.

I don't know what I'm supposed to respond to this with, so I end up letting her pull us both out the door and into the leftover rainwater of the outside world.

Milky gray, not desolate but definitely not welcoming. It's been this way for as long as I can remember.

I'm still trying to figure out the reality of this all, what with Lindsey flicking her black hair out of her face in worry, arms folded like her furrowed brows; but gratefully, she speaks before I feel the need to.

"You think Gerard's upset with you, don't you?" she begins, softly. Apologetic, almost.

I don't know what to say to this more than anything that's just happened prior. Really, I don't know what I'm supposed to say in terms of anything involving him right now.

So I shrug, realizing only when it happens that I'm shaking a little. I don't think it's from the cold, either, it's a thing in my bones. "I don't know. Yeah, maybe, I just thought I had brought up something shitty, and...I don't know, it wasn't my place. I just--is he okay?"

Lindsey's look turns increasingly sad as I'm speaking. This does nothing to ease my extreme confusion and general discomfort with this entire scenario, but whatever.

"I think you know the basics of it. Maybe not all the details, but you know he's getting bullied. Which means, well, inevitably-- Mikey is, too, now that he's in school with us."

"I know, I'm sorry, I wanted to--"

"I didn't say that you did anything wrong, Frank."

There's this mutual exchange of fear, of the fact that what we're talking about is bigger than either of us. Clearly, she knows far more than I do about what that means.

Lindsey sits down on the pavement, against the vinyl side of the building in spite of the damp ground. I join, and realize only when she starts talking again that I'm hugging my knees like a shivering kid.

"His parents are practically never home, for one, so they've got no help there. His mother's always on the road for business, his father lives over in St Paul most of the time to deal with his-- it's almost always just him and Mikey. They've had to deal with shit on their own almost their entire lives, you know? They're the last people who deserve to go through what they do-- no one does, yeah, but to watch one of your best friends and his brother get fucked around with like that is insane.

He doesn't want to talk about it, because they've got nowhere to go. It's multiple people, people with important parents and money and sports scholarships and-- just, nobody listens. There's no one they can go to. It fucking hurts, you know?"

She finishes speaking with a hard look glazed over her eyes.

"I feel sort of responsible, you know. Like-- like I don't do enough. I try to help them as best I can, but I know I don't do enough."

Everyone around here and our ceaseless guilt. Jesus, we're all a mess.

I feel like trying to put an arm around a near-stranger or generally getting overly personal-- even though she just confided in a hell of a lot-- would be weird, so I just nod. I get it. I can't even begin to imagine exactly how horrible it must be, but I get it.

"Gerard just doesn't know how to talk about it, because-- well, it's just so difficult for him. He wants to see you again, but...it's just a lot. He cares about you, though. Don't think he doesn't," Lindsey promises. "I mean this."

She stands up, extended a hand to help me up, and we trudge away from the wet ground, back to the commotion.

***

After the show we squeezed backstage and sat around on the moth eaten couches sipping beer and sucking down cold pizza, Pete still messing around on his bass. At some point the dark casts over the concrete outside and I grab my bag from the back of the room, walking back into the barren pit and burying my fists in my hoodie pocket. Two months in my junior year and it's colder than it's ever been in October, everything ink and icy.

I dig through my bag for a tape; definitely not the best idea to drown out sound with music when I'm walking home in the dark, but I've never had the energy left to care. Headphones or no headphones, if someone was going to jump me I'd be screwed regardless.

I pull out a tape, turning it over and looking at the wrinkled cover inside the plastic. The Killing Joke, Night Time. A pang hits as I recognize this as one of the tapes Gerard gave me on Sunday. I bury it back in the bag, instead grabbing a familiar record of my own and doing what I can to take myself away from the thoughts that keep raging on.

My mom and I share a tiny apartment in a tiny complex, on a street very few but its actual inhabitants ever go on. We've been there nearly a year now, since our last one was boarded up-- that's where we had stayed since my dad's last "visit", and we've always found ourselves in cramped spaces on some dilapidated lanes for as long as I can remember. It's not like any other family cares to get involved, much less my father, who doesn't have anything to offer anyway. No one does, but definitely not him.

I don't like thinking about that reality often, but tonight I don't have much of a choice when my mother-- who's somehow still awake-- nods me over to the kitchen table with a cup of coffee shaking a little in her hands.

"I think you know what I want to talk about," she begins quietly.

I do. And believe me, she's not here to talk about my chronic curfew breaking. She cares about things sometimes, yeah, but not enough to worry like that.

"Did he?..."

"Slow down," she begins. She's exhausted, I can see it in the deep circles under her eyes and the way she rests her arms against the table like a lifeline. She's always like this, but it seems like it's draining her away before our eyes tonight.

But she smiles. It's a genuine smile, and I try to put some kind of faith in that as she prepares to speak again.

"You're aware that your father's been job searching for several months, now, right?"

"I- he may have mentioned it over the phone, I mean-- he didn't say it was...y'know."

"Here? With us?" my mother asks me, reading my expression carefully. "Yes."

I don't think I can respond to this without hurting somebody. So I don't.

"I know this is difficult--shit, that's not even fair to just put it that way. I know we've been through this before, but we can't afford not to at this point. He's our family, Frank, and I can't support us alone like this. It's too unstable."

I'm not suprised. I'm in shock, quietly, but I know I shouldn't be. We've played out this scene more than once before.

I want to tell her that he won't change that. He'll just leave everything screwed up, even if we pretend things are okay for a little while like we do. But she knows that.

We're all just too tired.

So I just agree with her, and she goes to bed. I stay in the kitchen, staring at her cold coffee mug silently.


	5. Blister In The Sun

"Yeah, they're gonna print the next issue in color if enough people get it this month," Hayley explains as she hands me the latest copy of The Rotting House.

The zine-- which happens to be aptly named for the place I'd just been a couple nights ago-- has been circulating for a couple years now, but it's only been since the end of sophomore year that it really kicked off. She and Patrick have been running it from the beginning, with various friends helping then with the printing and distribution, not to mention the cost of it all. We've all long made it to the point where we've seen the light of fanzines being the highest form of cultural literature, and by now there's multiple series being passed around the scene.

Here in the parking lot, Hayley's got the stacks of prints set up in the trunk of her car, tucking the earnings into an old pencil case for safekeeping. Apparently Renee did the cover this October; the image shows a girl shooting lasers with poetry quotes written across the streaks. I smile to myself when I see one of the opening lines of Howl on one of them.

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

In the poem it all rushes into a single line, a single collection of breaths. Reading it out loud feels like an exorcism, the best kind. I've done it when I'm home alone sometimes, felt the way the words reverberate inside of me when I pretend they can save me from feeling drowned out.

"My favorite's the Sylvia Plath one, actually. It's pretty fucking cool, right? She did really well. Like she does with everything, anyway." Hayley hands another copy out, this time to none other than Joe, who clambers into the trunk to sit with us.

"Hello to you too, dickface," Hayley simply says, taking it in stride.

Joe flashes a thoroughly cheesy grin her way before flicking through his copy, the sepia pages leaving subtle ink smudges on our fingers, all calloused from guitars and microphones and everything else that we let carry us out of the ugliness of the real world.

"Listen, you know the bar over in Saint Paul that we played at a few months ago? Well, they booked Ryan's band," Joe tells us.

"Seriously?" Hayley says, eyes blown.

"Yep. It's the biggest place they've ever played, obviously, definitely no basement show or living room show, so they're kind of freaked out, but I told Ryan I was really proud of him. I wasn't playing bars in my Sophomore year, that's for damn sure."

"Well, someone's getting good luck lately, at least," I say, and Joe raises an eyebrow, but doesn't push it further.

Several feet away Pete has Minor Threat blasting on the player, broadcasting his taste in straightedge hardcore for us all. By the back door, Bert smokes and strums a guitar lazily; the passenger door of our current headquarters opens as Patrick grabs another armful of zines to give to Hayley. The familiar activities buzz all around us, and I suddenly feel intensely grateful for it. As alone as I feel most of the time, I can't picture how much worse it'd be without this.

I take a drag of my own cig, the same sharp warmth cutting into my throat. When you grow up with a mother and every older kid you know sucking them down like the second coming of christ, you don't have much of a choice in it.

"Anyway. They're gonna let us in free, so you guys had better be there next Friday, right?"

"Affirmative," Hayley confirms as she hands out more zines. She turns to me.

"Yeah. I'll be there."

And for some reason, I mean it.

***

The last class of the day is Pre-Calc, which is public school jargon for Un-Creative Torturous Bullshit Designed For Your Personal Despair. I'm already dreading it and I've managed to actually do my homework on time, which is saying something. I have a condition that usually prevents me from getting around to doing incredibly mundane and boring things on time, obviously.

I'm already half asleep by now, and I'm starting to really regret my rejection of coffee as an energy source. My mother has a point with the way she drinks like three mugs a day, I guess.

Our school's been over capacity for god knows how long now, but for as long as I've been here the halls are a death trap to the concept of personal space.

This is what makes it incredibly easy for people to be a dick. Teachers rarely bother to try and venture into the storm, much less pay any attention to the semantics of what's going on inside of it.

You hardly see it coming, either.

"What's with the anarchy shit?"

Keep moving, and see if they have the energy to actually try and get a response out of you. That's the tactic. Some of my friends have trouble with this concept, but given what happened that night however many days ago, I'm not the best, either, apparently.

Still. I ignore the assholes as best I can.

"Pansy, I asked a question. You answer those, fuck you."

Creative. He's come up with three sentences worth of insults that don't involve the word 'fag'. Gotta give him credit, really. This guy's pushed me around before, but it's been a while since he's gotten bored and tracked me down again.

"Ah, so you're a mute fag, now?"

And, check. There it is. Shame, he was doing a decent job.

"Not what your mother was saying last night," I half-heartedly mutter, but he doesn't hear. He's busy trucking on through his ritualistic masculinity-preserving homophobia kick.

"You and Way fucking now? You all doing shit in the art room with the satan club?"

Oh, come on. He could do a lot better than that.

But that doesn't matter. The mention of Gerard sends me spinning around to face him.

"The fuck do you care?" I spit.

He knows he's hit a nerve. The grin's unmistakable on his sadism-starved face.

"I don't. Really, I just find it entertaining. Especially he likes getting his face beat in so much, you know."

Sociopaths are predictable. They find your weakness and they twist. I know this. I know all of this, yet I'm shaking. Not out of fear-- though, yeah, I'd rather not get ripped in half by some random misanthrope. It's anger. It's energy and I don't even know where to put it, like it's dripping out of my pores.

Gerard's voice cracking, they way he walked hunched out of the room. Mikey's silence. Lindsey staring at the concrete, the guilt radiating from her.

I'm going to break something, something internal but something still tangible. Right now, though, it feels like it's going to be me.

The kick to my shin comes hard and fast, the nameless guy stalking off as the impact throbs in my leg. I feel dampness soaking through my jeans slightly, the blood welling up in beads where the shoe ripped up my skin through the denim. I stumble and catch myself, cringing when my leg bends and stretches the tear.

Things feel underwater for a moment, but when I get up I can see another guy smirking in my direction, no doubt in on whatever the fuck just happened. I ignore him, feeling sick as the lightning thrashes through my shin. I'm not looking anyone in the eyes.

I'm a few seconds short of being late to class, the bell ringing as I step inside. The calc teacher rolls her eyes, but says nothing when she sees the limp and the spots of dark red on my leg.

That's how it works. I realized very early on that the cruelest kids relied on the apathy of the adults in power.

Right now though, I don't give a shit about my leg.

I'm concerned something else entirely.

***

The smoke swims in and out, everything in a silver haze around me. I didn't realize until the filter was half spent how tightly I was gripping the cigarette between my fingers.

I don't speak to anyone when I slip off school grounds. It's not just the obvious fact of avoiding the local assholes' newfound attention to me; it's also because I don't even know where to begin with the concept of being able to interact with anyone at the moment. Much less my friends.

The doorknob wobbles weakly when I open the front door, the deep key marks scratched across in the surface against my reflection on the metal. It smells damp, I can see the dust particles rising to the surface when I enter. It occurs to me that neither my mother or I are here enough to keep it well lived-in.

That shouldn't make me as uncomfortable as it does.

Anyway, all its previous inhabitants have made up for our constant absence. Sometimes I like to image these kinds of places we're always staying in are falling apart at the seams.

When I get to my room, I lock the door behind me. I'm completely alone for the next several hours, but for some reason my brain's begging for as many layers between me and the world as possible.

I stick Violent Femmes' record in my player and lay there, trying to get lost in the acoustics as best I can.

I don't move when the phone rings. I feel like I'm glued to the floor, my room a mess of neglect and anxiety around me. I'm here. I'm right here and the only thing I can think of doing to stay sane is try to forget that there's anywhere else involving anyone else. I can't block everything out, though. The plaster patches on the ceiling blur together and make peeling shapes above me, the thoughts creeping back in through the cracks and broken seals.

You know that I'm worried about him, John. You don't need to provoke him anymore--

My father might be here any time from now, living inside these same walls that my mother and I managed to start calling our own. I still feel like a stranger in here, but that's going to stay the same wherever we go. I've never lived in a house, and I don't think I'll ever want to. This cramped place feels hollow enough.

Angela, do you really think you'd have a faggot for a son? Relax.

I don't forgive easily. I don't think that's a direct result of anything one thing that's happened to me as much as it is just the way my life seems to carry itself as whole. Those words were uttered once, when I was twelve years old and hiding behind the chair in the corner of the living room, the blue fabric scratching against my drooping forehead as I listened to them talk about me. They said all kinds of things, anything, talks of money and futures and hope like I'd grow up to have none of those things. I didn't understand a lot of it, but I was old enough to understand that word.

It used to scare me because of that. The word felt like when I scraped up my knees running down the creek when I was seven, the dirt digging into the fresh wounds and little bits of gravel stuck in my skin. I hated it, I ran from it like the time I was eleven and hid in the school bathroom because I didn't want people to see me crying over three fucking letters.

That changed the older I got. Eventually it just gets tossed at you enough to where you become used to it, barely feeling the knife edging against the old scars and scabs. Sometimes it still stings, but god forbid you say anything about that.

The first time anyone ever used that word like it was a good thing was in my freshman year of high school. I met Pete sitting on the bike rack with a stolen cigar dangling out of his mouth, and he wouldn't stop talking about the Sex Pistols. I thought this was the coolest thing, obviously, because I had virtually no friends and definitely no friends who gave a shit about punk rock. We just got wrapped up in the conversation, and by the time he started talking about his own life it rolled out of his mouth like the easiest, most shameless thing.

I'd never heard someone call themselves a fag. And he was happy about it-- just like his friends were, not giving a shit and just loving people. Eventually I started to feel happy about myself, too.

I owe them all that much.

But my father is no punk fag teenager. He's a worn man with worn ideals that he can't bother to change. There's not a lot he cares about, just like my mother-- only he's heartless about it, only putting himself into any situation when it's convenient for him. And then, all he says are the same things, the empty words that ring out with how little he bothers to understand us.

I'd like to think that my mother isn't like that. The day behind the chair when I was six, she started to speak up, like she was about to say, "I didn't mean that was--", like that was bad, but my father cut her off, and she backpedaled.

Their relationship has always been like that. Some parents like to hide that, but if they ever did, they did a pretty weak job of it.

A couple hours later the phone cries out in the monotone birdcall again, and I groan. I'm guessing the most likely thing is either my mother or Pete, or Bert wanting to get stoned or something. There's also the possibility of it being my dad checking in with one of his occasional rituals of rubbing salt in the wound of his chronic absence-- you know, to half-ass keep up the whole not-a-dick-parent facade.

I pray to god it's not the last option.

Down in the kitchen I lean against the wall, curled up in the floor like a lonely child. Fuck, I might as well be.

"Hello?"

"Hey," the voice answers me softly on the other line.

I don't have anything to say to that. So I don't.

"Frank?"

Gerard sounds lost. The same way I am, and instead of being angry or confused or happy, my voice just cracks when I speak.

"I-I'm sorry, about everything that happened a few days ago, at lunch, and everything, really--"

I'm gushing out words. And holy shit, I think I'm going to start crying.

I don't have an answer for that, either.

If I were to look inside right now at all the gears turning and ramming into each other clumsily, falling apart and melting and some still spinning, but more rapidly-- if I were to pick it apart I might be faced with the drained look on my mother's expression, the hopelessness on Lindsey's face, the smirk on that asshole's face when he spit Gerard's name out like a disease. There would be the apathetic messiness of my father, the way all of these people and places and stories are coming together into one train wreck, with me tied to the tracks.

Or I'm the train wreck itself. It's that simple.

"Hey, hey-- I'm sorry. Not you. I...I am, okay? Please don't cry, w-what?"

Gerard clearly has no idea how to react, which is about as good of a reaction as one could expect from a guy he just met a week ago crying on the telephone.

"I'm. Well. There's just a lot going on right now. It's not anything you did, trust me."

"Frank, but it is. It is, and I'm a fucking asshole."

I guess maybe from some perspective, maybe a more sane one, I should feel indignant, but I don't.

"I'm just tired," I say. "Train wreck. Seriously."

"Forgive me for having the nerve to say this after nearly three days of being a cold shouldering dickwad, but-- maybe I could help you with the whole train wreck thing. Y'know, considering I know a lot about that kind of thing."

I realize that maybe I do need someone with the experience in the train wreck field right now.

An hour later, I'm letting Gerard in the back door.


	6. Lovesong

Whenever I'm alone with you

You make me feel like I am home again

Robert Smith's voice resonates softly between the bedroom walls, putting a layer of fog between us and the rest of the universe.

We're sprawled out on the mattress, exchanging words without any pressure. It's been a long few days for everyone.

"My dad's coming to the apartment tomorrow to pick up some stuff, so there's that," Gerard says quietly.

"Oh."

"Yeah, I think the more they leave the less I want them back," he admits abruptly, then stops, his eyes closed for a moment. When he reopens them, he continues on as if nothing had happened.

"The good news is that both of us are leaving before he gets there. The last thing we need is him finding Mikey with a black eye and neither of us able to explain it, right?"

"Isn't he going to...um." I trail off, cursing myself for even beginning the sentence, but Gerard just laughs quietly. It's a little sad, even, but he keeps it hidden. "Going to want to see us? Nah, he's busy enough," he says.

"I'm sorry," I tell him weakly, and I mean it. I would know a thing or two about flaky parents and their excuses for being the way they are, but I don't tell him that my situation's a lot messier and pathetic yet. Something tells me it's about to come out, though.

"Anyway. You know that my mom's been in and out throughout today, though. She's got another couple days before she has to leave again, so I don't know if you'll want to come over right now..." Gerard admits nervously. "And don't be sorry. It's just out of everyone's control, you know? The way shit is."

"With your parents?"

"That. And other things, yeah."

I don't push it further.

Gerard eyes me carefully. I try to tell myself that this isn't just the same useless pity that I've occasionally managed to get in my life; the kind that seems sorry but in the end can't come too close for fear of falling into your mess. Finally, he speaks up again.

"Do you wanna talk about what happened, though?" It's a meek question. I don't think I'm going to clam up if I try to spill the truth, like he did, but that doesn't make me any better-- I can feel the ugly energy coming up in my throat, threatening to gush out all that's cluttering up. I have issues of my own that could plague him if we're not careful, just like he thinks he's going to pull me into his trauma.

It was me crying on the phone, though, and I can't deal with the sadness evident on his face as he looks for an answer, a reason. It's not that simple, but I don't see what I have to lose.

"My family is fucked up. You know that, right? You could at least tell. It's pretty damn obvious." I push out the words and watch them diffuse into the air.

Gerard doesn't answer, doesn't move; then he nods, eyes starting to show apprehension. I start to feel sick, but I'm already here.

I go on.

"My father's just...he's an asshole. I think it's more of a gray area than that, sure, there's good in him, but it's not enough. It's not enough for him to feel sorry for the fact he's been in and out of my life, my mother's life, for as long as I can remember and always leaves when shit gets too out of his hands. I think we're a game to him."

"Frank..." the boy next to me reaches out hesitantly, to touch my shoulder, but before he pulls away I wrap my fingers around his wrist, to let him know not to be sorry. He shouldn't be at all, but it's stupid to expect that of people. The least I can do is let him know that it's okay to be confused as shit on how to approach me or my problems.

Pretty sure he would understand that sort of mess, anyway.

"Well, he's decided he wants back in again."

I don't feel exactly when I'm crying again, but I take a breath in and it's all falling apart. I can register Gerard pulling me in for a hug, so I take it and just like that I'm soaking my tears through the shoulder of his T-shirt. I can smell the cigarettes and coffee on him, mixing with the scent of makeup powder and his hair dye and a thousand other things that are starting to become familiar to me.

"He doesn't deserve you," he tells me plainly, looking me dead on as if it's critical I know this.

And because he looks so intent on this, and because I trust him even if I shouldn't be trusting anyone, I pull him closer and nod into his shoulder again.

"I know. I've been trying to tell myself that, but it doesn't change anything. But I know."

***

There's something about late October that stands out from everything obvious: there's Halloween, there's my birthday, there's fall and the cold and the leaves everywhere, but there's something else, too. Maybe it's just an after effect of all of those things combined, but it feels a lot softer and needs a lot more attention to appreciate.

Right now, that feeling is taking the form of watching Gerard sketch out the lines of the trees and streets moving and standing tall around us, melting together, breaking apart, all filtered into the page on his lap as he brings it to life all over again in black and white. Right this moment it's his hair hanging in his face and the way he looks over and rolls his eyes, laughing at me, this soft giggle that's just full of everything we've learned about each other and gotten to experience. The plastic bag from the comic store rests between our feet.

It's nice. This feeling has always been nice, but right now especially it carries more weight, like I need to hold on to it with all I can even it tries to slip away.

"You act like you've never watched someone draw," Gerard teases, and I scoff, feigning offense before I say something fucking cheesy about his drawing being completely, world-shattering different than everyone else's. Or something like that.

We have to bundle close together on the walk back to his place, watching cars speed past with jealously for a heating unit, leaves and god knows what other dead plant corpses crunching sharply under our feet. My throat burns from sucking in the biting air too fast, my eyes ache, but we make it work with anecdotes and music history lessons, Gerard telling me all about the goth club up near downtown and Siouxsie and Danzig, me rambling on about Ian MacKaye and me discovering the Rotting House shows, and everything in between. It's geeky as fuck and it all weaves together in the cruel breeze with a smirk and a mutual understanding of each others' lives. Music is what raised us, and it's some of all we have left. He gets it every bit as much as I do, probably more.

Gerard tells me about his comics, about the trippy insanity of Doom Patrol and the genius madness of Akira, explaining the backstories of complicated characters and these endless arcs and plots that wrap around each other; the time passes before I know it and we've managed our way through suburban Minnesota in late fall. It's a feat of true grit, really. You can tell by the way we're shivering into each other as we stumble in the door, like we've never felt indoor heating before.

Mikey looks up from his place in the living room, reading a novel Gerard no doubt got from his bookstore job. When he makes eye contact with us he nods aggressive towards the outside of the room, lids open wide.

"Oh. Um, well, that's....uh. I didn't know she'd be so--oh. Early." Gerard freezes up, looking between the house and the still-open front door.

"I'm sorry," he mutters to me, cheeks flushed and his eyes at the ground, but I stop him.

"Gerard."

"Gerard."

He exhales, panicked, but meets my eyes. I speak again.

"I get it. Please. You don't have to feel bad about me meeting your parents, okay? I get it. You know that."

He shakes his head, chewing his lip, but I give his wrist a weird sort of squeeze of encouragement, not really sure where this is all coming from but rolling with it all the same.

"Mom?" he eventually turns around, down the hall.

A woman typing away on word processor looks up from a room at the end of the hall. She reminds me of my mother in the way she's so clearly tired, just more well to do and probably not having to worry about her husband's next uncalled insertion into their family.

She raises an eyebrow at me, but corrects herself quickly and puts on a mask of polite greeting. Something tells me she's already not too fond of her son's fashion choices, but definitely not on board with the presence of someone like me and all my political patches and torn denim. Lovely. Already I can see Gerard cringing in my peripheral vision.

"Oh. Hi, you're a friend of Gerard's, obviously?"

I nod, then remind myself to actually speak human words. "Um, yeah. Yes. Nice to meet you...?"

"Mrs. Way. That's fine," she encourages, then turns to her son. "Definitely not surprised, you seem like his kind of people," she notes awkwardly, pausing a moment before standing up and exiting. "I've got to go downtown to get some paperwork done in a few, but there's some stuff in the fridge."

"Oh-um. Okay. Bye, I guess..." Gerard says as she grabs her bag, heels clicking as she gathers everything in order.

Mrs. Way gives him a skeptical look, but otherwise moves on.

Once out of earshot, Gerard grimaces, but shrugs.

"That's about how it usually goes. Maybe a little less friendly if she's feeling the energy to chew me or Mikey out for being antisocial or dressing like shit or whatever."

Under his makeup, the black eye is mostly concealed, but when he sees my look of concern he just laughs darkly. "My dad's been known to occasionally get pissed at us if he manages to notice evidence, but neither of them give a shit, really. She's almost never said anything about it, but I know she can tell."

I want to hug him this time, let him know something consoling if not helpful, but I have no idea where to begin.

Mikey emerges from the living room, looking more disheveled up close.

"Yeah, they don't need to get involved," he says flatly, stepping over into the kitchen to pour a mug of coffee. I don't know many people that devoted to caffeine at nearly five in the afternoon, but then again the Way brothers seem to have an otherworldly addiction to it.

"Did something happen?" I try, careful not to set anyone off again. I can see the different reactions both of them have to their mothers' indifference, and I can hear clearly the sound of her car driving off as we speak. It makes me more uncomfortable for their sake than is probably appropriate, but since when have any of us freaks been in the business of following those rules?

Gerard looks over to Mikey, who just stares at his mug sharply. Upon seeing he's not in a state to help him much, he just looks back to me with a short groan.

"I've talked to the school about the shit we deal with, you know. But I didn't have all their names, and their parents probably have their own fucking lawyers or something. And a lot of them don't even go to our school, or are even in high school still, the ones who give me--us--hell, the school assholes' older brothers and friends. Honestly, it was a mess. The school social workers didn't give a shit and couldn't do anything about it, and it just would've made it all tenfold worse.

They called my mother, though, like the braindead dicks they are, and next thing we know our tone deaf parents are asking us why kids are calling me a fag, why I dress the way I do and act the way I do and how it's my own fault if shit happens, sorry-kid-but-we-can't-deal-with-this. Tough luck. I don't think they'll ever understand how bad it is now, because we kept it quiet from then on. Since, it's gotten a thousand times worse, but we can't fucking say a thing."

Gerard explains this all with a stone cold expression, Mikey avoiding our gaze and pulling in a breath. I'm reminded again of how young the kid is, and it hits like a white hot bullet.

"I want to help you. Seriously. Right now. I am going to get you out of this," I mutter, but Mikey just sighs and turns his back to us like he's seen this before. I expect Gerard to do the same, but to my shock he just squeezes my wrist in the same way I did, shaking his head.

"Just don't leave. That's all. I don't have much in the way of friends, if you haven't noticed."

***

The wind's picked up, beating against the bricks of the complex as we leave it and trudge into the wet grass.

All at once, the memories from behind the blue chair mix with the ones with Pete on the bike rack, the bullies and the friends and everything else. I just feel it and let it go. We've brought ourselves here to vent, to expel the negative energy, and that's exactly what I'm going to help him do.

"Faggot!"

I yell it out at the October frost, the suburban houses and rows below us on the hill. Gerard flinches, but grins when he sees the giddiness on my face.

"I'm a fag there's nothing you can do about it! Nothing!"

And just like that I'm cackling. I'm actually bent over, fucking hyper from this. Gerard starts giggling too, and coughs before screaming between the cigarette in his mouth.

"Fuck you!" he yells, looking at me, then beaming and sticking up a middle finger before speaking again with a kind of unmissable pride:

"I'm a fucking faggot! And I'm in love with it!"

The more the words rip from our throat the more powerful they become, the more we can feel all the trees and clouds laughing along with us and reminding us that if nothing else, the cold air gets us. The leaves get us. We're freaks and as shitty as people think that is, we and the air are in on the secret. We're freaks and it's fucking beautiful. I think every so often we need a moment to remember that, even if we wouldn't be standing here in our obscure shirts and weird thrift store clothes and insane grins if we weren't proud of it.

We're both fucked up kids from fucked up places, but we've got that commonality going for us, at least.

When we go back down the hill, Gerard's still laughing, like he's never felt anything like that in his life. And when he hugs me, tightly like I'm gonna blow away if he doesn't, I hug him back without missing a beat.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he says, his head knocking on my shoulder each time he says it. "I'm sorry I freaked out. I'm sorry I'm so bad at talking about this shit. I'm sorry."

I'm worried he's going to cry, and given everything that's gone on of late, if he cries, I'm going to start crying, too. But neither of us break just yet, instead just breathing in this whole friendship that exploded out of our separate disasters.

"We're going to figure this shit out. I'm not even kidding."

In the darkness that's cast over everything by now, I think I see him smile again, just softly.


	7. New Day Rising

The plastic of the telephone is cutting into the skin of my hand, like it will never fit right in my palm, the edge always digging in somewhere at the the tendons.

"School doing alright?"

There is a date. November 28th, he moves out of his apartment, and presumably into ours.

I don't think I can hear a wisp of incredulity in my father's tone. He can afford to treat this as meaningless, can't he? I know it's note that simple, but it might as well be. Nearly three months since I last spoke to him, nearly two years since I've seen his face. We don't hang photographs up in here. We never take any, and none of us would want to sift through boxes of complicated memories and shit, anyway.

"'S fine."

"You taking any of the...the AP classes?" he speaks as if he's trying too hard to sound interested.

"I told you last time we spoke. I'm not into that."

"Not 'into it'?"

"Yeah." I should feel worse about how flat my voice is, how hollow the sound is between the cracked ceiling and the uneven floor. On the other end of the line, I hear him sigh and pretend to care. "Well," he says, with finality.

"I'll see you," I push the words off my tongue but he stutters out, stopping me.

"Listen, this is uncomfortable. I know it is, right?"

"It's not. It's fine."

"C'mon, your mother and I--"

I suck in a breath and roll my eyes harder than I've ever done in my nearly seventeen years of breathing. This is one of the places he cannot cross, where I draw the imaginary line. My father cannot pretend he and my mother are a unit when he's outside of our lives more than he's ever been in it. That's fucking logic.

Since when has that ever mattered?

"I don't need to talk about whether it's comfortable or not. I'm fine. I'll see you."

He gives up on trying to act like he cares, mercifully.

"Alright, well."

"Yeah."

"I'll see you."

The phone is back on the receiver, and I imagine it burning through the wall.

***

"You didn't fucking ask me."

"Excuse me? Ask you what? If it was convenient for you to be a part of this goddamn family?"

"You know I can't be like that. I'm not good with these things? I don't know, stop trying--"

The fabric is cheap and it's searing my forehead, like blue flames but duller, grayer, worming its way inside your chest and settling there like rocks.

"I didn't ask for any of this," my father says and shrugs, leaning back as if they're discussing movie tickets, or an old car, or overgrown grass in the front yard. "I'm gonna go insane here, that's what it is."

For the first time, he said something I understood.

***

"I can't play guitar to fucking save my life," Gerard says, laughing against the flannel quilt thrown haphazardly across his bed. "I really can't. It's terrible. And singing? I'm not that good--"

"If you're about to say you're not a good singer, Gee, I will actually walk out of this room. I'm not even kidding. That's the worst lie I've heard anyone try to tell, hands down." I stop flicking through the liner notes of his Unknown Pleasures LP and roll my eyes, putting every ounce of emphasis into it.

"Okay. Yeah, whatever, fine. But I can't play guitar beyond, like, the first three chords. Much less play guitar and sing at the same time. So that's where you come in."

I mess with my lip ring tentatively, side eyeing him carefully before smirking.

"I'm not gonna lie and say I don't really wanna do this shit, y'know."

Gerard knows he's won this round, clapping his hands together and whipping out his sketchbook. "I knew you'd be all over it. I've talked to Ray and Bob about it, but we wanted another guitar, so, perfect. Perfect. It's great." He's genuinely happy, this giddy smile on his face while he pulls out some sketches and scrawls of logos, names, song titles, running across the thick pages like the ideas are running a million miles an hour, streaming out onto paper every time he puts a pencil to it. I think he knows how often I get lost watching him whenever he gets into one of those moments, the kind of creativity leaping between the light behind his hazel eyes and the surface in front of him, like he's tapped into some secret source none of the rest of us could picture.

He's just something incredible to watch like that. I get angry whenever the idea that someone could hate him for it flashes in the back of my skull, the shitty parents and shitty people who make him feel like whatever he has inside of him shouldn't be there.

Anyway. I'm trying to forget about that part, if just for a little while.

The last few days after fall break have been filled with these speculations between the two of us, and despite the fact I consider myself to be a very extraordinary sort of asshat, Gerard insists I have stories worth telling. I guess it's pretty damn nice to feel like he sees me as worth the kind of creative value he is, the kind of special that sort of radiates off his skin because you can just fucking feel it. I couldn't ever be like that for someone, but it's nice to know he thinks different.

On my birthday I walk into the art room in the morning as usual, and before I can open my mouth to say a single 'hey' or the like, I get the literal breath whacked out of me by way of Ray Toro clasping me in a particularly sudden bear hug.

"Happy birthday, badass rhythm guitarist!"

I groan, and a little across the room Lindsey, Bob, and Gerard are cackling at this. Even Mikey cracks a smile behind his comic, which makes it worth it enough alone.

"I guess," I mumble, shaking my head but allowing myself a small grin. Lindsey drags me forward, pointing her thumb in the direction of the handful of boxes lying on their usual table. I can feel myself visibly redden, wondering why the hell they went through the whole ordeal of getting me gifts. On cue, Bob shushes me before I can object with my embarrassment.

"We got you shit. Deal with it," he teases.

That's how I end up with a painting from Lindsey, a set of guitar picks from Ray, and patches from Bob. I have to be shushed again multiple times throughout the process, but nevertheless I get myself to shut up and give them all every bit of thanks I can manage.

Before the classroom clears out entirely for first period-- the art teacher's planning period, fortunately-- there's a tap on my shoulder, and Gerard sets his bookbag on the table with fanfare.

"Oh god, Gee, you didn't--"

"Shut your trap, punk princess," he says before making me close my eyes.

"I can take this back if this isn't one you wanted," he says, the nervousness in his voice evident.

"Whatever it is is perfect, dude. Seriously. Can I open--"

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay."

I let my eyelids snap open before he can even finish, and once that's happened, they stay that way for a damn long time before I can blink.

"Holy shit."

"I looked around, I know this is--"

"Gee. Gerard." I stop talking immediately, though, because the last thing I need is to start crying or something in the middle of the junior art room.

Husker Du, Zen Arcade, released just last year. There's no telling the hell he went through to get this, and honestly I'm afraid to ask.

"Oh my god, just--thank you. Thanks. Thanks so much. I'm gonna be saying thanks until next Halloween, Gerard."

"Are you crying?" He asks hesitantly. I slap my hand over my face, but he takes it away.

I can feel his eyes reading me carefully. I've told him things about my life I haven't let anyone else on in a thousand years. Maybe it's because he's been through that kind of shit, and maybe it's because there's something there with us that gives me the courage to. I don't fucking know, but I do know that in the months that I've known him I'm really fucking thankful.

"You're welcome," he tells me quietly, and just like that he's got me tight in a rare hug.

***

"If I face my fears

Will my skies be all but clear?

Probably not, then again

I've always held my doubts so close to my heart

That these frames have trapped all my better days

There they stay, frozen and unscathed."

It's been a long time since I last had to worry about my fingers shaking against the guitar strings. Nowadays, I'm in my element almost as much as I am alone. You don't forget about the crowd, you don't lose them-- you share the way the steel cuts into your calluses with them until you're all feeling the music in some kind of way, different but all there.

I don't have a car to deal with the kind of job I would have if I was more responsible, maybe. Seventeen and I've come to the conclusion that I may never have a lot of things. But when I get up at some local dive and start strumming, at least I feel like I'm doing something of importance. 

"Though I've traveled far

I've been back to the start

And I found some scars in places I have never shown

To anyone

I don't know why it took so long to get back home."

At the end of the set I hear my newfound friends in the back, clapping the loudest, Ray even whistling. Gerard meets my eyes exactly, seemingly by chance, but then we're both just grinning as wide as fuck through the sound of the small crowd's enormous sound.


	8. Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want

"I don't think my mom cares enough to throw me out of the house at this point," Hayley says, laughing like this is the most hilarious development in human history.

"Hey, at least yours don't love Je-buss more than literal human beings," Pete rolls his eyes and takes a long drag on the cig. "Maybe they'd care if that wasn't the case, but it looks all of our folks have got their hands full with more important things than supportive bullshit or paying attention to their offspring."  
  


"True. I'd almost rather them be, though, because then maybe it'd be like they had a reason. Y'know. To be so distant."

"Everyone's parents are distant. Name one person with parents that aren't fucking shitheads," Lindsey agrees, finally speaking up from where she's sitting out on the blanket across the concrete. The air's starting to get way too biting for us to be out here in our free time, but as with most things, we try to make it last as long as we can.

"Uh. Maybe Leonard Jacobs. They bought him a fucking Volvo last year, didn't they?"

"Leonard Jacobs' parents probably have thirty illegal insurance companies in the Cayman Islands, Pete."

"Hey, maybe that's what I'll do with my life. Start some black market stuff and fuck people over for a living. That's what the republican party is anyway, and they're in power, right?" Pete shakes his head and stomps out the last of the smoke, sighing and huddling back up against the cold that's slipping under our jackets and dragging itself against all our shoulder blades.

"Probably. And shut up, man, you know your band has a shot more than any of our's. Seriously. Don't screw yourself up before you even have a chance to make it big like you're clearly going to." Hayley raises an eyebrow, nudging Lindsey, who nods immediately in agreement.

There's something increasingly comforting about Lindsey and other people I've only just gotten close to beginning to hang out with us. It gives me hope that even if things are still gone to shit in some form or another, the wildly different but equally messed up people we all are fit together like this. I like not feeling like a shitty person with no friendship making abilities sometimes, you know.

"Yeah, okay. Says you, who started playing bars at the age of goddamn eleven."

Hayley just shrugs, smirking all the while, and goes back to her sketches for the next _Rotting House_ issue.

Lindsey gets up, checking around the corner of the school bricks and scanning the sidewalk with a weary look.

"You haven't seen Gerard, have you?" she propositions to no one in particular. When no one else has anything to say she locks onto my eyes with concern. By this time each morning, he's always here, and according to this logic, he's not coming.

"He would be here with us if he was. Even if he went to the art room, we would've seen him, so..." I feel my stomach drop in disappointment.

The more I see him, the more I need to see him. I think that's a dangerous feeling to have, sure, but I'm in it way too deep to go back from it.

"Well. He tends to get sick, but the question is how much of that is sick or just 'sick'. At the end of the day, I can't really blame him," Lindsey mutters, and grabs her bag before heading off. Eventually everyone else scatters to class, too, and nothing about it's mentioned again.

***

The payphone outside the rundown grove of picnic tables is free, mercifully, probably because nobody's here to eat out in the remnants of the downpour from last night and the sprinkling that still keeps on. Even as I stick the coins into the slot I feel rain hitting me softly, speeding up as I pick up the receiver.

"Hey."

"Oh. God, hi. Hey, Frank."

Gee's voice is too many things at once to read, but I feel that it's definitely not good. The roller coaster of this boy is going to drag me down the tracks right with it, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

"Shit, are you--"

"I can't talk about this over the phone, I'm-- look, I'm sorry, I don't want to be all secretive about shit, but I can't- I-"

"Okay, slow down. Hey. You're okay. I promise."

"I'm not, though, Frank, fuck--"

"Well, you're going to be, goddamn it. I'm going to get you there if it kills me."

"Don't. You know that's not something you're able to do."

"Yes. I can and I will. Stop."

The rain was becoming actual rain again, the whole sky sloshing around like a vertical river and everything set back to blurry neon tones.

So I jog through all of it, hoping it cleans some of the panic away while I leave classes and friends and all of it behind in the distance with my destination in mind like the back of my hand.

***

So there's the matter of the black eye, which must be hidden.

It's like chicken pox with the way the same colored bruises are scattered across his jaw and arms and no doubt everywhere else. Gerard keeps his eyes closed as I watch him pull out the bandages from the cabinet, looking away with the shame burning in his cheeks.

"Gerard- hey, just let me take care of it. Please. You're really torn up right now, I'll get it." I reach for the supplies, sick of watching him struggle to gather everything because he's too embarrassed to accept my help.

"You don't think I fuckin' know that?"

I step away, and immediately he recoils, biting his lip and finally staring back at me.

"I'm sorry," he whispers hoarsely.

I almost tell him not to be, or that it's okay, or any of that, but I don't even know where to begin. I'm not that hurt by any of his words, sure, but he's still standing here, a mess, being the punching bag for people with no fucking soul. He, the kid with all the spectacular art and stories in his notebooks and the reds and grays he paints across his eyelids, all of these things that people are trying to crush because that's what they do best. I don't care what he says to me; I can't think of the right words because I can't keep watching him get crushed.

Instead I don't say anything, and when he buries his head in my shoulder and starts sobbing like he's got demons to expel, I understand that panic. I've held company with the hungry wish to just shove it all away with tears and blur it out like a bad oil painting, but when you get that way about life you know that it doesn't work. It doesn't work, but I understand why Gee's sure as hell trying as he holds his arms fragile around me.

How many more breaking points will there before before he's gone?

I help Gerard pull the torn and twisted Bauhaus shirt off his broken skin and he instinctively goes to shield himself with his arms. I want to tell him how completely insane that is, considering how my head is literally screaming about how gorgeous he is despite the fact I should _not_ be thinking about that at a time like this; I can't stop myself from being such a fucking idiot, though, so the least I can do is keep the rush of attraction that flares up when I see so much of his pale skin. Even if it's stained with the bruises, it's exactly that. It's gorgeous.

Anyway. Consider it reason number infinity for me to hate myself right now.

I help Gerard clear away what's left of his makeup and get into bed, wrapping the old quilt over him despite his blank expression.

"Gee?"

He rubs his eyes furiously, wiping away the tears that still linger on his lashes. When we finally make eye contact again I can see his bottom lip quiver, and I hold onto his shoulder as gently as I can.

"Please. Please tell me something."

"It doesn't matter, Frank."

"You know it does. You know that."

Gee just hides his face against his pillow, shaking his head, like he's trying to disappear.

"I don't even know these people, Frankie," he eventually mutters, curled up. In all the time I've known him I've never seen him like this, so worn away and broken that it hurts to look away, but at the same time it's a battle to just look at him and see him like that.

"I know--"

"I didn't even recognize half of them. I don't think most of them even went to our school, ever, I don't fucking know. I can't fucking do anything and they're gonna do this to Mikey, they're gonna do everything they've done to me to him and it's--"

"Don't say it's your goddamn fault, Gerard."

"But it is, isn't?"

He shrinks back against the mattress.

I don't have the words to do this. I never did and I'm scared I never will, but the last thing I'm going to do is leave him.

"And they're going to find you, you know," he croaks, his hands twisted in his faded-dyed hair with anxiety, but I pull them away and instead just keep them in mine.

"We'll get out of here."

Gerard laughs at this, but doesn't bother to tell me how naive the idea is. I curl up against his hunched frame as best I can without hurting him and he doesn't push me away when I keep my arms around him.

We're so still it feels like the dust froze mid-fall in the musty air around us. I don't dare break it.

"He called me-- that, you know. My dad." Gerard grips the edge of the pillow tighter, eyes suddenly wide.

"He called you...what?"

Gerard scoffs a little, but moves closer to me anyway.

"My own fuckin' dad called me a fag. To my face. I almost had to get stitches that day 'cause some college asshole friend of some other guy got me after school. And you know what my old man said when he found out about it? He told me it was a lot of things he couldn't help me out with, but more than anything else, it was my fault for being a fucking fag."

I didn't expect to start crying, but I couldn't hide it once Gerard looked around at me intently.

"Y-you-- you don't believe that shit, Gerard. You know you don't."

"Yeah. But that doesn't help me much, does it?"

I just clutch him as tightly as I can. He's right. Everything's so fucking wrong and he's right. We're two kids stuck in the system and that's how it's going to be.

I don't fucking get why I should ever just accept that fate.

***

The next week, Gerard stays away from school. I bring him his classwork, tell the teachers he's sick when they get curious, and help him keep everything under the radar like he wants. It gets repetitive, fielding the same questions about him and getting angrier at myself for being so damn useless in stopping the nexus of why he's hidden away in his room instead of in the parking lots and art rooms with the people we finally called home.

Nearly every day there's a new insult hurled my way from someone I've hardly seen before. It's not just the football players, the cheerleaders, the cliche kids who're supposed to be assholes for asshole's sake according to every John Hughes movie ever. It gradually builds, and the criteria seems to get less and less specific for who wants to show the punk homo how much they hate him.

I've never spoken about my own sexuality outside the closed doors of only Pete and Gerard's conscience. Hayley knows, too, but she's never changed the way she acts towards me or brought it up. Other than that, I've never made any outward suggestions that I'm gay, but the moment you break some age old code of honor in what's socially acceptable according to the in crowd, that's what the assumption is.

The amount of time I've spent with Gerard-- which has become obvious to anyone around us-- apparently means I get a promotion in terms of maltreatment in the prison of American schooling.

It's the guy who digs his nails into my arm and hisses _hey, twink_ in my ear, leaving deep half moon marks on the skin. It's the girl who passes by my desk in physics and "accidentally" rams into the side of it, laughing to her friends. It's every person who kicks and mutters at me, the incidents increasing tenfold more than they ever were. I don't even have time to feel sick about it. I've got more important things to feel sick over, like the boy curled up in his bedroom, or my mother who lets the people who hurt her back into her life like it's a fucking family reunion. It's not her fault that she's been screwed over, but it still burns to see it happen.

Everything is literally spectacular.

Still, each day I walk home with Mikey, helping him through the back routes to avoid people. If I can't be useful enough to stop what's happening to Gerard, the least I can do is help protect his little brother. Mikey doesn't talk much at first, but as we head back each day he opens up a little more. He likes baseball, and he tried to play bass guitar once, but said he sucked at it. He reads Batman religiously, and thinks his brother's obsession with weird indie stuff is cool, but kind of morbid.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes with this kid, but I don't push it.

And every day that we make it back to their home in one piece, it's worth it just to see the smile on Gerard's face.


	9. Eight Miles High

My parents have never been at peace with one another so much as they've been between wars with each other.

I never really knew where I fit in that picture as a kid, but when I got older and I seemed to see my father less and less-- and my mom, at that, given how often I escaped the house as I started seeing shows and trading zines and generally doing what I could to be properly isolated instead of just emotionally-- I figured it out: I didn't.

If there was nothing to be where I was but nowhere to go anywhere else; I thought maybe the latter would hold something at least halfway cool or important or less miserable, but I'm still seventeen and my mother still has nobody to help her with being human. It's not that she's not capable, sure, she's a lot more capable than people like my dad-- the person who should be, anyway-- but something about leaving when my sort-of-family is so fucked up and she has to keep it all together seems like a dick move. More than that, maybe I'm just that much of a pussy, too drowned out by feedback and rain and parents who can't be parents in my life that it's scared all the hope right out of me.

Or I'm just bored with everything. That's probably the issue here, to be honest.

The first few days are the easiest, ironically. You'd expect it to improve over time, the reality of the newest attempt at putting things 'back together' or whatever the proper term for what they try to do when they reconsider the scattered mess of it all. You'd expect it to hurt a little less each time I walk past the man in the hallway, skinny and graying and looking way too empty to be as young as he still technically is. But that's the mess of it: it doesn't hurt. It does something, but I don't feel the stereotypical kind of pain like I feel the awkward exchanges emptying out me, too. This whole apartment is full of emptiness and he's just here to make it worse, I guess. This isn't totally unfamiliar, but it's been long enough for me to still trip up on what emotions I'm supposed to feel or not.

After those first few days is when it actually does hurt like a motherfucker. He stares at us over his coffee mugs, which I'm shocked to find he's suddenly into again. For the longest time he swore off coffee just like he did Mom.

He's like a leech and maybe I should feel bad about it but I don't. I don't have time to feel bad about it. I don't want to have any time to think too much about the fact that he's here in the first place, but he starts to make it harder to ignore.

"I'm keeping this job, okay? Shut up."

_"Excuse me?"_

Mom stares at John incredulously, but they both know it's not time for them to explode just yet. Instead, my supposed-to-be dad just looks away, pretending not to see either of us, and my mom has no choice but to do the same. This happens a lot, as you might guess. On the telephone is usually where it takes place, but when we do see him, I get the fanfare of seeing a number of their arguments firsthand. They're loud or quiet, angry or exhausted, but there's always enough vitriol for them to take place.

"Look. Okay. Alright. I got my job, you just don't lose yours, okay?"

"You fu-- the hell is that supposed to mean?"

I cower back from my position at the door while I hear them, and know I'd better leave, even if this is too early on for them to risk losing their minds. Before I manage this, though, there's the slap of bare feet on destroyed old flooring, and John appears with my mother's coffee mug in his hand. This detail pisses me off a lot. I keep this to myself, naturally.

"You getting any good income?" he flat asks me, taking a sip of what's probably cold caffeine at this point.

"Jonathan, he's goddamn seventeen. Let him be," my mother exhales from the end of the hallway.

"Exactly! He's almost a grown man, Angie, for god's sake, it was just a question. Jesus christ. Frank, you know what I mean, right?"

I pull in the rush of breath frozen in my chest as calmly as possible, already done with the clearly dissonant key signature of this day.

"Yeah. It's fine."

It is not fine. My mother actually glares after me, something that's a mix between pity for me and a question as to why I don't say anything more to stop or encourage either of them.

Ironic, I guess. I'm seventeen.

***

_"No. You're gonna listen to me, you hear? I'm not your friend. Never said I was your enemy, but I'm not here to be anyone's friend, okay?"_

_He picks up the old exams and spelling tests with childish lyrics scrawled across the back, the record with the blur of the man with the sword and the words Black Sabbath, Paranoid. My worst fear flashes in my head, that he'll ruin these things or scream at me or something else I don't even have the time to think up. But instead he just lies the contraband on the quilt, sitting gingerly on the bed where I'm curled up and sniffling._

_"You don't need me to tell you how strange you are, Frank," he begins slowly. " You know that. Now, everyone's strange, whatever, but I need you to promise you're not gonna lose it or something. You know? 'Cause sometimes, people lose it. Don't find out what that means, Frank."_

_"What?"_

_I'm eleven. He comes sometimes for Christmas with the rest of the sparse family that bothers. He jabs a thumb at the paper, then back at me._

_"You just need to. I can't watch out for you, okay? You need to get some shit together."_

_"Dad-"_

_"Okay?"_

_His stone glare says nothing but the confirmation that the words he snapped at my mother years ago-- that he's eaten them. I'm the faggot son and I'm the strange kid and he doesn't really care anymore, only when he hears me playing my records from my room. Turn it down, he says. And then he leaves me with this to worry about some other time when I'm older and sicker._

***

Pete sees me coming and hops off from his usual perch on the bike rack. For a senior, he's pretty hyper. Most of his friends are drained out of their minds from the need to graduate before they jump out the third story English Lit window. It's Christmas in fucking Minnesota and Peter Wentz, the trustworthy beholder of all high school angst and punk rock is gathered here at the school with his crew of fellow man-sticking-to-ers for what seems to be a meeting that devolved into Joe trying to splash Patrick with drugstore soda and Andy reading something about the history of vegetarianism and politics. I make a mental note to ask about borrowing it some time. He's also wearing a just a sweater rather than a coat, yet seems far more content with the weather than any of us. He nods a simple hello, then returns to his work while Pete jumps up to tackle me. Joe grins and there's chocolate in his teeth, to which Patrick, cringes and burrows deeper in his coat.

"Shorty! I hear you're the proud forerunner of a band now," Pete shakes me by the shoulders aggressively with a maniacal face and I groan, shoving him back.

"Proud is a stretch. And forerunner. And band, really. It's just an idea right now, y'know."

"Sure it is. How many songs have you written yet?"

Pete grins and yanks me to sit down with the other three. All I can do is shake my head, and he elbows me harder until I admit I may or may not have scribbled down a few lyrics for whatever it is Gerard's dragged me into.

"I wanna read, c'mon, what's your damage--"

"Pete. _Pete_. Dude, I don't even have any with me. If this works out...well, maybe you'll see."

"Okay. Ah. I see, you and the goth kids gotta keep it mysterious. Cool, cool."

"Yeah, sure. Whatever."

"I've conquered the demon of Elvis Costello references and social anxiety!" Joe yells after successfully bringing his pop from the can to Patrick's shoulder. The latter just rolls his eyes and hurriedly brushes the intrusion from his coat, muttering "freshmeat" at his younger band mate while the former pats him on the head (or fedora, rather) in mock sympathy.

"Well, there's _that_ ," Pete says.

He pulls out his notebook and flashes it proudly, something entitled _Switchblades and Infidelity_ dancing with the page. Pete's no stranger to hypothetical lyric writing, but he's probably a good twenty or so times better than I'll ever be at it. Granted, he denies this every time I say it, but there's hardly anyone in the school with the lyrical talent, apart from maybe that Ryan kid.

Pete knows, even with all the December Midwest bullshit and Joe and Patrick's antics in the background, that something is up. If anyone could tell that, anyway, it'd be him, and it's no except right now. He nudges my shoulder with a look of concern I hardly get, especially not these days.

"You came here for a reason, didn't you?"

I don't want to answer this at first, but I know pretending against it is as pointless as this trip will be if I do. So I just nod, to which Pete beckons me away from the ongoing semantics of the rest of the gang and starts his way to the back stairwell of the building.

"Hey, your body's in Minneapolis but your brain's over in fuckin' Seattle or something, I can see your eyes get all weird like that more and more nowadays. C'mon. You know I'm not going to give you shit. Unless you, like, shot someone. Hell, I'd help you hide the body, so yeah, hit me with your best shot, kid."

"Oh my God, Pete. You're making this into a John Hughes movie, calm down. There's just a lot...yeah."

"Yeah? Yeah is incredibly specific, Frank. Enlighten me."

Pete sits with his limbs wrapped like spider legs around the railings from the top of the stairs where we sit, focusing intently on the commercial-grade metal while he listens to me explain the general hellhole that is my life right now. When I finally get myself to shut up-- once I get going, it all comes out at light speed-- he nods slowly.

"What about Gerard?" he asks carefully. "Is he...okay?"

"For now. I try to help him with his schoolwork as much as possible, but it's all gonna catch up to us-- him soon, I think."

Pete looks like he wants to ask about the 'us' slip, but instead he just grimaces in agreement. "It's fucking disgusting. Like, I know you can't tell me a whole lot about his business. But I know enough to hurt for him, y'know?"

"Yeah."

"And for you," Pete adds. "Don't put all of this on yourself-- shit, who am I kidding, you're too goddamn good of a person not to do that to yourself. I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. But please just...I don't know. I want you and Gerard and everyone to be okay, I really do."

"I don't even know what the hell I'm going to do with my own life, much less how to fix anyone else's, Pete. I think I'm just a goddamn mess more than a decent person. And I don't think the supposed figures in our lives are going to be much of solution. They already failed him."

"You think I know either? Hell, my parents just straight gave up. I think they used to give a shit, but, whatever. I guess we give a shit for ourselves, right?" Pete cracks up, if darkly.

"Anyway," he finishes. "You care about him. You care about your life, even if you say it's a mess. There's people who care about you, too. Just keep it in mind, man."

There's not really a _yeah_ appropriate to respond to that, but I flash him a look to let him know that it registered. Even if it'll never matter in the grand scheme thing of things, it registered.  
  


***

The early aughts of January end up sucking even more than they usually do this time of year, but the time gets passed with all the planning that goes into this band thing.

There's a few phone calls exchanged about it, but it isn't until the first actual meeting that the whole group is able to comprehend the magnitude of what we're doing.

"Okay, well, this sort of looks like a band..." Ray says with a lopsided smile, and to the right of him Mikey, who's managed to learn bass in a matter of one winter break, looks up at everything skeptically behind his white-rimmed glasses.

"Shut up and start playing, guitar boy," Bob tells him, and so an awkward round of tuning ensues. It's pretty clear that Mikey is the only one who's been doing any recent practice, since his old secondhand bass is the only instrument currently not in a totally different dimension. Pretty sure even Gerard is having some issues getting his voice sorted out.

In the past few days we've talked about a lot of things-- in person, through telephone lines, whatever the situation calls for-- and this was inevitably one of them. Maybe his front is shy as hell, but there's little anyone can do to damage the attitude attack of a front man he wants to be, and I know he's got it in him. Right now he's clutching the hem of his shirt uncomfortably, radiating just the smallest bit of crippling panic and whatnot. I try to give him a friendly nod of encouragement before we kick into, like, the one Black Sabbath song we all know to warm up, but I worry it comes off as just dumb. As most things I do usually are. Either way, he's too nervous to say anything back, and when the vocals kick in he starts out a little shaky.

Everything starts to fall into place after a few seconds, though, and everyone sort of (messily, but good enough for a first shot) finds themselves. Bob's losing his mind behind the kit, in a good way, and even Mikey starts to copy Ray's pose of confidence and get some momentary self-esteem. Yeah, it's not perfect, maybe not even super great, but we're here and it counts. If we can manage this much already, then my hopes are uncharacteristically high. And that never happens, as you've likely figured out by now.

_Politicians hide themselves away_

_They only started the war_

_Why should they go out to fight?_

_They leave that role for the poor, yeah_

The voice I heard in the hallway the first morning at the Way's place is back. It's a lot angrier and a lot more intense, but it's him alright. And it's fucking awesome.

Practice just becomes increasingly more organic and comfortable as time passes, and by the third hour of messing around with our instruments we've got it settled: this can work. Or, as Gerard so eloquently puts it: it's not the absolute worst idea on the planet.   
  


***

_Can I do something?_

The way he asks it isn't shy, but it doesn't try to be brave. I don't know. I'm not in his head. I can try to be the interpreter, but I know what he's dealing with and the thoughts he has are something nobody should pretend to understand.

So when I don't bother to say _what is it_ and instead just give him a yes, I don't know what the rational part of me was expecting, but the little hopeful part of me that sprung out during practice knows. It's obvious. It's a stupid thing to hope for but yet it's happening, hey, it's actually _happening._

Kissing Gerard is even more cataclysmic than it was plotted out in my mind, I knew it would be kind of insane, sure, but maybe not explosive. Maybe not maddening and absolutely batshit crazy and the greatest thing I'd felt since finding out there were other boys who like boys and that punk rock existed. I guess I knew it would be something, but I already told you that I don't like getting hopes up. Or rather, it's just something that's incredibly difficult to do.

But maybe kissing Gerard is the flaw in the system, the glitch in the programming that makes life so sucky and the weather so cold and expectations so low. His lips aren't soft, they're chapped and cold and I shouldn't love it but I do, and maybe when I get my fingers tangled in his hair I hope he never cuts off I should feel stupid, but he just laughs and kisses me again. A little harder this time. Just as crazy.

I like this flaw. It's a nice one.


	10. Dark Entries

"You can't read _Watchmen_ in, like, two hours! It's too goddamn long. You gotta process it."

"I did! I swear, it's just that good, y'know?" I promise, flopping back onto the bed as Gee rolls his eyes and sets the book on his desk. I curl back up against his chest and hug him there to emphasize it. "I couldn't set the fucking thing down, Gee."

"True. True, okay I'll buy it. But you still have to swear you'll read it again. It's not something you just...read, y'know?"

"Yeah, you don't read it, you shove it up your ass--"

"Oh my god, _Frank_."

"Heh."

"You're literally twelve."

"And you're literally adorable as fuck when you start geeking out over comics," I retort, and he gives up arguing when I kiss him lightly.

I don't know exactly what we're supposed to call each other at this point, but I don't even know if we need to worry about it, either. Whatever this is between us feels organic the way it is, without forcing a box or a label onto it. Besides, it's not like I can take Gerard out on an actual date and hold his hand and shit. We've got enough bullshit coming after us for just existing as literal people.

I've made sure to watch out for Mikey at school, with what little I can do. Luckily I've got help; our friends are more than up for making sure he sticks with them and can avoid the asshats. It's not a perfect mechanism, given that they seem to just grow in numbers, people with nothing better to do than kick your ankles or call you a homo (whether or not you are is irrelevant, of course, but no doubt that'd give them a lot more ammunition.) Still, he's okay. He doesn't have any more bruises or black eyes, even if getting Gerard his schoolwork and keeping up the illness lie is just making the prospect of their parents finding out about it all even worse.

_Pock._

The tap isn't exactly faint. Something's clearly hit the window, even if it's small, but when both of us turn to see whatever the hell it is, it's gone.

_Pock. Pock. Pock._

The sound gets louder and speeds up, and this time the rocks hitting the glass are clear even in the shade of the overhang outside the window.

"Fuck," Gerard mutters. I don't even have to ask to finally put two and two together.

"Shit, what--"

"I swear to God, if those fuckfaces break my window," Gerard snaps, but he's clearly still terrified.

_"Hey, sweetie!"_

Holy fuck.

"Since when have they known where you lived, jesus christ?"

"I don't know, I don't fucking know--"

The snickering outside the window cuts into the air, January coming to disastrous opening before the sound wanes and fades into nothing.

"They're-- they just fucking left--"

"I doesn't matter, Frank. They fucking know. They know where we live and they're going to fucking--" Gerard starts panicking, curling up against his knees on the floor. "Shit, they know where Mikey is, where I am, they know you're here--"

"Gerard, stop!"

_"No, you can't just "we'll figure this shit out" our way out of this one! Okay?"_

Silence.

I'm terrified too. That's just it. They've broken both of us, and I don't think I ever had the fucking decency to think that through. It's worse than we can pretend it is, and that's the way it'll stay.

"...Gee?"

He sniffs, drags his sleeve across his reddened eyes, but hesitantly looks me straight in the eye.  
  


***  
  


Three years ago, Gerard tells me slowly, he had a boyfriend.

Not the nice kind to hold hands with and feel all whimsy about. It was rough from the beginning, but even if they were up against a thousands odds that'd fall apart if it came out, it felt like it was worth whatever insane risks it had.

Gerard didn't really care. He already had shitty parents and shitty grades and a shitty life, and at least now he had someone who'd listen to him when he felt like his mind was caving in on itself. Maybe Jackson was as fucked up as he was, he figured, because every time he let another depressive thought or panic loose the other boy made him feel halfway sane regardless.

Jackson wasn't the epitome of popularity, he wasn't on the football team, he wasn't an academic. He still had friends with expectations-- a lot of the former, actually, with even more of the latter-- and that added up to more than enough toxicity to make him turn into one of the most contradictory people Gee knew. As far as the other kids behind red plastic cups of beer and fake happiness Jackson had nothing to do with the reclusive kid in the trench coat, much less feelings for him. As far as anyone knew, actually, Gerard didn't exist.

He dressed weird, he talked too quiet to hear, but he was invisible enough for people to truly buy it. Irrelevancy was probably the best feeling in the world, he says, at least in comparison to how things are now.

It was inevitable, though, that something would snap. He pretended that a relationship that felt that important and that amazing even through its complicated painful parts, the secrecy, could stay secret if they kept enough tied down away from those expectations. It was fine. It was Jackson's absolute nightmare, something he constantly reminded Gee; that he couldn't be found out to have any connection to him that transcended the occasional quiet wave in the hall. You cannot exist. Not with me, was what the message felt like when it always hit Gerard square in the chest. He stuck with the other boy anyway, even if he was much more scared of himself and much cooler and a grade above Gee. It had to be fine. Nothing that felt that normal, even if the circumstances were hectic, could be anything other than fine.

They knew it wouldn't, but when the mutters got out Gerard thought maybe Jackson would stay within reach. To Gerard, being noticed was terror. Being noticed in the way that made people kick at his shins and call him shit he'd never even heard of in only his freshman year of high school, the way that made the boy he'd convinced himself he trusted or had something important with just drop him like that.

To cover his tracks, it seemed, Jackson would have to give Gerard absolute hell.

So that's how it happened: he denied and lied to the point people eventually let Jackson off the hook and believed he'd never have anything for a fucking freak like that. Gerard tried to call him, but the dial tone never stopped. _The little fag's got STDs, I bet. Kid's probably a fuckin' Satanist or something. Messed around with older guys and shit. I dunno. Bet he's got issues._

The rumors didn't cease for him. Within a matter of a few weeks he was a blaring red target when before he'd never been given the time of day by anyone. Someone wrote _slut_ on his backpack, the one he'd spent hours sewing Joy Division and The Damned patches onto, and someone started up a rumor about him having HIV. It was completely out of control, both the situation and the way that no matter what, there was someone around the next corner. After a while the novelty of it died out for most people, but Jackson and what friends he'd amassed weren't about to let go. Some of his friends had siblings in college, friends from other schools, both teenagers and near-adults in their lives who couldn't wait to have anything better to do than put a gay kid through their perfectly crafted version of misery.

It became a reality for Gerard. The last thing he wanted was to be noticed, but now that that'd been ruined, he could only think about what it meant for his parents that couldn't give him thirty seconds of time, or worse, what this meant when they started using his little brother as a target, too. He just did his best to keep that part of his life away from everyone, especially Mikey.

After school a day in April of 1983 Gerard nearly collapsed walking through the front door. His parents happened to be home that day. The last thing he wanted, even if nothing he wanted ever was granted to him, was for them to find out, but at that point he'd given up. Some ten minutes ago one of his few friends he'd managed to make, Ray, had called the police on the three nameless guys who'd got them only a few blocks away from the local punk club they used as a refugee.

Disaster or not, maybe they'd managed to change something, he dared to hope.

The ringleader of the group was Jackson's older brother, who'd just recently left college. Upon finding the school administration at their front door, they threatened to sue them with all they had, which was a sizable amount-- and since the school barely cared to begin with, it was all written off as a wrong accusation.

 _I can't have you like this,_ Gerard's mother had told him.

_Like what?_

_You know goddamn well._

She looked like she could hit him right then and there, after it all ended, but instead she just leaned in and hissed at him:

_I won't tolerate it. Do you realize what kind of shit you've put us in? Not again. You can be assured of that._

Not once did his mother or father ever mention a word about the man who nearly bashed his face in. Instead, he was threatened with packed bags and his secret spilled, despite never having mentioned a word about his sexuality or how this all began.

There were things that would serve as a death sentence for him, he knew. Gerard was in hell at school. He decided he couldn't afford to be in hell at home, too, or even worse, in lack of one.

So he shut up. That was all he could do.  
  


***

Someone took a nice, brand new permanent marker to my bag. I smile darkly when I see it, because the irony of what I just learned a few days ago is not lost on me. It hurts like a motherfucker but all I can manage to do at this point is start laughing.

 _Pansy._ It's clear, all caps, no punctuation but underlined multiple times in hastily lines that bleed down the canvas. I still have bandages on the back of my legs, and fingernail marks on my arm. I've got a mental calendar marking down the days until I get a pretty little splotch of purple over at least one of my eyes.

I know not to try and sneak out the back exit early or late, since there's almost always someone there expecting a new victim to try and play it smooth and run away. There's nothing to do but make your way down the front steps with everyone else, and hope this isn't the afternoon that any given bone in your body is broken.

"I like your backpack, Iero."

I've covered it in what's left on the ink in the marker at the bottom of my bag, but that's irrelevant.

I realize that I'm not getting out of this pretty early on. When the figure steps in front of me I recognize who it is: none other than mister fuck-up himself, bringer of all evils. Fucking lovely.

"Hi, Jackson."

"Oh, we're getting smart with it, aren't we?"

"Sure," I mutter. I know I'm pushing it, sure, but unless something raw snaps I don't think he cares quite enough about me to slam me into the pavement around dozens of students and teachers.

"Listen, I wanna talk to you about you and your friends, y'know? There's some shit I've noticed."

Behind me, some fucker in a tattered Vikings hoodie snickers like he's watching Monty Python while snorting coke. A real show. That's what this is for them.

"You think I'm hanging--"

"-- out with Way, yes, faggot. I'm not fucking blind."

"Congrats," I mutter. _You have a pair eyes and basic deduction skills. Have a cookie._

My head is screaming for me to whip out all the new dirt I have on him, everything he's done, because damn would it feel good for about thirty seconds. But I don't want to die today, and I definitely don't want Gerard to die today. If not this very moment, I know I'll be knocked out clean before I make it three blocks to my house if I show him I know anything about this.

"Just lookin' out for you, buddy. Don't want you catch anything," Jackson quips, and snorts before shoving my arm just a little short of a mildly violent body slam. It's the same game he's played with everyone else who's life he's intent on destroying, no doubt, but I can't hide the fact that the worst of those victims is Gee, and how much that makes me want to fucking strangle a guy twice my height and twice my weight.

I think about scrambling for the payphone and seeing if Bert or somebody could get my a ride home, but most of the actually halfway reliable people I know don't have anymore in the transportation category than I do. I pull my jacket tighter around me and do what I can to scan for an alternate route, just to be safe. I don't know how much longer these asshole's charity will last, but no doubt they've got some twisted shit in mind for the likes of us if they still have the motivation to even acknowledge we exist.

The first couple blocks are quiet. A station wagon drives by and the inhabitants stare at my combat boots like I'm wearing dead rabbits on my feet. The last of leftover rainwater drips down onto the asphalt quietly from the depressed trees.

Most days I'm left alone on my walk; but with Gerard gone for so long, I guess they've developed withdrawal.

"Cheer up, it's almost Spring!"

The fist comes flying out of nowhere, this time dealt by someone I barely recognize. The last time I was hit this hard was that night behind the restaurant, with Mikey and Gee--

I don't think I'm going to pass out. I don't think I'm going to. I'll be fine. I'll sit down.

I think I hear some muffled voices, the assailant and what I think-- I think is that dumbass in the hoodie. _Shut up shut up shut up shut up._ Every noise is designed to make my head split in half over and over.

When I regain some kind of awareness I get a burst of adrenaline, the hit bruising my jaw rather than my eye, but my vision blurry all the same. That guy's good at throwing punches. He should get a trophy, right? Amazing. Spectacular. Run run run--

"Frank?"

Whoa, no one's cleaned the kitchen in like, a million goddamn years. It's fucking insane in here. I can almost see clearly. God, I think I'm going to throw up.

_"Sit down."_

_"The fuck is wrong with him?"_

_"John, stop--"_

"HEY!"

My father is a mess of bumbling confusion right now, and it manifests in a roar that makes little sound waves crash violently in my head from the impact still ringing in my jaw. I want to laugh. That's how bad it hurts, but I have a dizzy feeling John isn't going to be too happy if I do that.

"The hell are you getting into this kind of shit, boy? C'mon! _Answer me!_ "

Mom is yelling for him to shut up, and I feel blood trickling out of my nose like a hot tear. My mother grabs his shoulder, and suddenly his expression goes blank.

For a second I think I see remorse.

Then my father looks down at the wrinkled bookbag at my feet. I did a pathetic job of trying to obscure the word under the scratched lines, and in a haze I can still see it clear enough to make out what it says.

"Oh, God, Frank."

My father just mumbles this, rubbing his face in exhaustion, like he's given up on something he barely had faith in to begin with.

He walks away. Mom doesn't bother to stop him.

I want to say sorry, but for what? I can't apologize for their violence and forgive myself for it. I can't tell them how or why or who or what.

But I can just stay here and pretend that we'll forget and move on.


	11. My War

"It sucks."

"Everything sucks. I can't chew food right now, Gerard, just play me the damn song," I tease. Which is true. When it's not throbbing with enough force to practically knock me out, I can't even feel the left side of my face. Gee kisses it anyway, and I playfully shove him, signalling him to begin before I'm tempted to just collapse and stay there, in his arms without the energy or desire to get back up and leave them.

"Fine, ugly," he jokes and sticks out his tongue, which is so unbelievably adorable that it puts every puppy I used to beg my mother for from the animal shelter to shame. And that's saying something, because I really fucking love puppies.

"Go..."

"Shh. Sh. I gotta-- just lemme-- give me a second."

He takes a moment to collect himself. You know the song's important when it takes him this long to work up the courage to sing it, even just in front of me.

_We hold in our hearts, the sword and the faith_

_Swelled up from the rain, clouds move like a wraith_

The way he sings is always raw, but this one is so much so that it's like his voice is going to rip out of his throat. It's almost scary, but I don't want to tell him to stop. It's a exorcism and he's letting me in. I like to think that's our relationship, but I think it's something he's made all his own.

_Well tonight, well tonight_

_Will it ever come?_

_Spend the rest of your days rocking out_

_Just for the dead_

_Well tonight_

_Will it ever come?_

_I can see you awake anytime, in my head._

***

"Okay. Friday, 9 pm, if Ryan's set doesn't last like three fucking hours again," Ray explains, smirking and leaning over to give Ryan a knowing look from the other table. Ryan, of course, just shrugs. His silk vest and Beatles T shirt only serve as proof of his love for the dramatics, as does his exceptionally long setlists.

"Ah, so the wannabe goths finally got organized. About time," Joe says, setting down his tray next to Andy. Bob just rolls his eyes at this, but I can tell even he's excited as hell about the prospect of getting this band off the ground.

"You gotta name?" Andy asks, ignoring Joe's attempts to pour soda on his french fries.

"Maybe. Possibly. See, I wanted to name us Knives and Sorrows, but Bob said he'd kill me if I told Gerard about that, because he knows he'll dig it, apparently."

"Hey, I'm trying to make sure you don't give our band a shitty generic angst name like fuckin' Knives or whatever. That's just sad. Anyway, Mikey's idea was pretty good."

"Mikey's is angstier than mine, man! He's not even sure if he wants in the band yet!"

"We do need a bassist..." Bob ventures, but Mikey immediately shakes his head. "I suck. I completely suck. Pete said he'd fill in for you guys, anyway, there's no way I'm gonna try to actually learn bass right, I can barely make toast, dude!"

"Ug. You don't suck--"

_"Yes I do!"_

"Okay, just tell us the name you came up with," I tell him, and Mikey sighs, awkward again.

"So our parents used to take us to mass when we were little, on like, Easter and stuff-- and being catholic and all, we had to learn about Our Lady of Sorrows. I was obsessed with her, she was like the spookiest thing to me. And I just- I dunno, I was playing around with that idea--"

Ray holds up a hand, already nearly as ecstatic about this as Mikey's nervous rambling is.

"That's fuckin' weird, dude. Our Lady Of Sorrows. Weird as hell. I love it."

"I mean, I guess I don't hate it," Bob jokes, raising an eyebrow at me. "It's super dramatic. Like we are. Especially Gerard and his five layers of corpse paint and eyeliner; that's the whole point, right?"

"Yeah, Frank give into peer pressure," says Joe from across the art room, giddily paging through an old anatomy drawing book like a middle schooler.

An hour later we have a name, a set list made of the few songs we've managed to pen down so far, and Pete volunteering for a bassist fill in.

Ray's laid out several intricate homemade chord sheets, reminding me of his position as the much more practical and calculated guitarist as opposed to me often just saying 'fuck it' and spewing out a weird progression that sounds cool. Bob offers to bring over some equipment to record our next practice, maybe turn them into demos. Even Hayley joins in favor of photography, which irks Pete given that she'd made a deal to do an actual photo shoot of Fall Out Boy a while back but never got around to it. What with them never not busy playing, or, in the summer, doing their best to do a cheap teenage punk version of a tour, I can't really blame her.

"So, that pretty much makes this the point of no return, right?" Bob asks once we've all stopped scheming and Patrick's managed to shut Pete up about photography for five seconds.

"Is there ever really a point of no return, though?" I ask, kind of rhetorically, but also sort of confused as to what he's implying here.

"Don't know. Maybe not. But honest to god, I think we have a decent shot, short stuff."

***

The walk home involves a lot of squeezing through alleys and side streets, but so far there's been no repeats of the events of a few weeks ago. I can look in the mirror and barely see a bruise at this point, and I don't really have any plans to change that, so my route's been altered dramatically. For now, it works.

On the way I'm still hung up on Gerard's latest song, and for some reason despite all the instinctive yelling in my brain that's saying he _needs_ to get his own personal songs out there-- the ballads like that, the one about cats or whatever, the list goes on-- I get why this stuff is so private to him. There's the other part of me, the greedy one that crawls out sometimes, that says something that important should be kept sacred and quiet anyway. It doesn't matter; it's not my decision, and I don't want to try to make it be.

_I can see you awake anytime, in my head._

I just want him to be as safe as he is in that picture of him I try to keep in mind. Pointless battle, maybe, but I've pretty much given up trying to stop fighting it.

Getting up onstage at the Rotting House is usually pretty easy, but when I get there tonight and start to unpack I feel this sudden wave of anger. I haven't had much energy to be pissed about our situation-- everyone's situation, at home, at school, with Gee. I didn't have the energy to feel much when Hayley told me that they're running out of cash to print the zine; not when the older college kids in the back of the show wouldn't shut up about how dead and dying punk rock was or when even The Young Veins, Ryan's lifeblood, is finding it harder and harder to book shows.

I don't even flinch when my father goes off on something new at my mother or when I'm sitting at lunch feeling the familiar onset of loneliness in a crowd, something that I thought was starting to subside for the smallest window of time. I get notes slipped through my locker with three, four, five letter words about my failure to be straight or make friends or dress like I give the slightest shit about whatever masculinity is supposed to be in the eyes of guys who think hugging each other is homoerotic. There's always new kicks to the legs and getting blocked in the halls and snickers in class, but I've survived. Gerard's still at home, faking stories about school when his parents so rarely call, but I know even without them as a factor this mechanism can't last forever. There's only so much I can do besides bring him homework and create shit explanations for the quadratic formula and biochemistry.

My performance is too stuck in my own head to feel right, even if Lindsey gives me a high five and Pete claps as loudly as possible, Patrick covering his ears from the sound. I tell Ray and Bob not to wait for me when they offer to go to the 24 hour diner. I think I'll throw up if I don't just go home and stay there until the next century. I can at least sleep away another few hours.

The screen door rattles even louder than it used to when I get there. I forget how insanely old this place is, even with the cracks in the ceiling. I don't even remember a time when the water in the kitchen sink wasn't nearly frozen shut in the winter. It's funny, since I know enough to be aware of the fact it's hard for us to pay the rent even for the half-broken ditch. Apartments are shitty, but for my family, they just keep going further and further that route each time we relocate.

"The hell have you been, kiddo?"

My dad is drinking from my mother's mug, but I make a note not to ever point this stuff out to myself when I'm upset. Right now, I'm kind of upset, if you haven't picked up on this incredibly subtle information.

The word _kiddo_ also makes me want to slowly peel off my skin with a screwdriver. My dad thinks it's endearing, which is pretty much the only instance he ever cares about being endearing. I think it's going to make my ears bleed if he cops it one more time in that fake-dad voice of his.

_Calm the fuck down._

"I was playing."

"With who?"

"Shut up, Dad, you know what I mean." I'm surprised by my own apathy in word choice, but fortunately he doesn't find this quite too offensive. Yet. He just laughs, chugs more coffee, and I start to question if he's on a particularly bad acid trip or just cracked like the rest of us.

"You can't be running out of the house like that at all hours of the night, y'know," John continues, his voice more calculated now.

"Huh-- okay, what?"

"You're not deaf all of a sudden, are you kiddo?"

"Don't call me kiddo."

"Excuse me?"

I figure rolling my eyes is not in my best interest at the moment, so I settle on staring at the floor as if it killed my ancestors or something.

"Just stop trying, Dad. Stop pretending like you care, okay? I'm seventeen."

"That's exactly what someone who isn't mature think sounds mature, Frank."

I just stare at him for a while, and wait for him to explode. Nothing.

 _Good fucking night_ , I think to the floor.


	12. Ceremony

The future has never been something I was particularly comfortable with.

"Be honest. Seriously," Gerard presses, cigarette dangling precariously between his lips as he leans in earnestly.

"Okay, fine-- shoot."

"When you were a kid did you have fantasies about running away?"

"I figured everybody had those."

We sit cross legged in the back of the Rotting House, passing a smoke between each other and spooned up in each other's arms.

"Was it a sort of fascination, though? An obsession, even?" Gerard asks, exhaling the spiraling smoke and watching it diffuse into the air. I snuggle into his neck while he strokes my hair, calm but with a distant look harbored in his eyes.

"I probably thought about it more than the average kid, but honestly...no, not really. Is that what you're saying it was like for you?"

Gerard shrugs, inhaling smoke roughly enough to emit a small cough. "I don't know. It was more hypothetical. I'm not sure how I'd describe my thing with running away, but there's this part of me that never grew out of it. Especially after the whole-- well, y'know, Jackson thing. The worse it got the more desperate I became to just _escape,_ and as insane as it sounded, as insane as I felt, I was never able to put the idea to rest."

"So how'd you finally shake it off?" I ask.

Gerard pauses, reading my eyes with his in the calculated manner he always does.

"I still haven't, Frankie."

He takes another drag of the cigarette, and hands it to me. I don't take it, staring oddly at him instead, and he shrugs again and sticks it back in his mouth.

I blink dumbly, waiting for him to elaborate. When he doesn't, I finally pry at it.

"You can't be serious about running away, Gerard. You're not insane, but that's definitely some insane shit to talk about."

He just chuckles. "For a punk, you're not very revolutionary."

"This-- this isn't about rebelling against shit, Gerard, this is your life you're--"

He holds up one hand, steady. "Frank, will you get a grip? Did I say I was running away just because I have some fucked up escapist fantasy?"

I squeeze his hand, eyes closed. "I don't know. It's not even been a year yet, Gerard, I'm still freaked out. Like I'm gonna screw something up, or something is going to come to a point where-- where you're just going to disappear. It's stupid. But I'm just scared for you, okay?"

He pulls me closer, stomping out his cigarette and pressing his face to my hair to speak softly.

"I'm not going anywhere. The crazy in me thought I might, yeah, but I've been given reasons to stay. You've given me one reason, at least."

His brows are furrowed with worry, but I can't read why when I'm the one worried for him. Like he's gonna slip between my fingers like a ghost and fade out.

"You promise," I said shortly, tracing my finger along the gray contour on his cheekbone, watching the dust gather subtly on my skin.

"Yes, your majesty, I solemnly swear to thee--"

"Just promise. That's all."

Gerard nods, still holding me against him tightly. "It's a promise, Frankie."

He captures my lips with his, just quickly like a sort of seal on the imaginary treaty, but before he can pull back I've got him pulled to my chest and run my tongue against his lips, feeling his mouth open and move with mine slowly. He groans and rolls his eyes at my antics, but entertains them anyway; his hands go to grip my hips, and I release how quickly it's moving. I should be more nervous, but I'm not.

Gerard stops, detaching his face from mine with a lopsided grin.

"Like I said. I've got just a _few_ reasons to stick around."

I scoff. "Uh-huh. You'd better. The hell would you go, anyway?"

To this Gerard's smile falters a little, replaced by something kind of uncanny, a little feverish. Again I am reminded of how much thought he's put into morbid fantasies; I tell myself to be glad this one at least involves him pining for an outcome that keeps him alive.

"I have friends who are college students up in New York, live in this shit apartment like it's a hippie commune or whatever-- but they split the bills, they get enough to eat, they buy records and fuck and do whatever artists do when they're not busy being in high school and hiding to save their own skin. I've known Brendon since we were kids, and he always said if push came to shove he'd be there to drag me to NYC. I'm sure he was joking, but I wouldn't put it past him. He's helped a lot of desperate people. I just try not to be one of them each day I'm stuck in this shit town with shit people and all that melodramatic stuff, y'know?"

"I'm telling you, Gerard, the extent to which you have this planned out has me worried."

"Lindsey and all our friends would look out for Mikey, sure, but I still-- I don't know, that's another thing. I'm leaving for a community school, or just to get a job, I don't care, as soon as I graduate regardless. I worry about him, Frank. I really do. But at the same time, the more I remember I've got another year of this shit, the more I feel like I'm in a fucking bell jar."

He whips out another cigarette, lighting it hastily while his thumb fumbles with the lighter.

"I know. But I'll stay in the bell jar with you, until we can leave that shit behind us." I lace my fingers in his, feeling the cold of his white knuckles and the webbing skin between each appendage, interlocking into mine in a near death grip.

"Us?"

"Or--you know. You. I didn't mean--"

"No. No, you're okay. I like it. I like it when you say 'us', even if it's naive. It's comforting."

Outside backstage we can hear our friends piling into the venue, setting guitar cases and mics and amps and drums down onto the creaking wood that always shuts up once the crowd gets going. Tonight is the first night our band becomes a part of this world, even if it's just the small little world of a bunch of scrawny punk kids. I can feel Gerard's hand shaking in mind, his eyes shut in concentration.

"I like it too," I admit. "But if we don't hurry, we're gonna miss one hell of a show."

And with that, Gerard presses one last kiss to my lips, and steps out into the cavernous room.  
  
  


***  
  
  


"Someone's nervous," Pete quips as he and the rest of his crew return from the stage. Currently, Mikey sits perched on the armchair of the couch, his eyeballs pressed to his knees, which are in turn hugged to his chest. His bass is propped against the wall, and every so often he looks at it, then back out to the right stage entrance-- or rather, hole in the wall-- with a flicker of fear.

"I can't so much as do oral presentations in school, Pete," Mikey mutters. "Of course I am."

"Oh, shut up. You've talked more over the course of tonight than you at any point I've been around you before combined. You just have to tell yourself you're practically dripping confidence. Just tell yourself that. You're gonna fuckin' kill it."

Mikey shakes his head vehemently.

Gerard looks at his younger brother sympathetically. "Hey, you and me both, kid. I'm about to make a run for it, actually, so see you guys later," he jokes, to which Bob rolls his eyes tremendously and pulls him back by his jacket collar.

"Nobody is going anywhere. If we're going to go up there and make fools of ourselves and sing about summoning demons or some shit, we're gonna do it together."

"I'd suggest you do it any minute now, though," Patrick advises, motioning to the last of their equipment being pulled from the front stage by Joe; who, of course, carries his precious shitty-but-nostalgic amp to his chest smugly.

I quietly flick through the strings of my guitar, making sure it's still halfway in tune. Ray nods to me, signaling he's ready, too; Bob grabs his drumsticks and Mikey reluctantly takes hold of his bass. The hand is gripped in a vice around the handle of my old amplifier. We're all looking around at each other, processing this; and with that, Gerard takes a deep breath and strides out to the waiting crowd.

Set up, plug in the equipment, announce ourselves to the crowd and get the hell going. It's a process I'm all too familiar with on my own, one that has to be efficient and precise to make the right statement.

I've never been here, standing stage left to the most beautiful boy I've managed to see in my seventeen years who grips the mic stand with determination; his scared straight freshman brother with his bass pulled close to his waist; our friends behind the kit, the other guitar, and in the crowd poised to hear what we have to say. Okay, so poised is poor word choice; counterculture is not poised, and neither is the energy of the audience, cigarette boxes tossed to peers and whoops of anticipation and chatter. But that's just it. It's fucking perfect, messy and catastrophically young and fast.

"Now, if you'll turn to page three of your _programme ...._ I'm kidding. We're Our Lady Of Sorrows and we're here to perform a goddamn punk rock exorcism," Gerard growls into the mic.

Go.

I'm vaguely aware of my fingers forming chords and pressing into the thin slices of the strings as we play, captured by a mind of their own to play the right notes. My brain seems to be functioning, but my heart is in my throat and threatening to spill out into the crowd, from Lindsey chanting us on to Pete and the rest of his band jumping in tandem with the pounding beat, even Patrick hanging on to the ledge of the stage platform with a grin. I can see Ryan in the back, arms crossed and nodding his head in the oh-so-hipster way he always does, the corner of his mouth turned up. I see faces I recognize from the hallways of school, the kinder faces that understand, and people I've not seen once in my life who move euphorically in the pit.

All of this, all the notes streaming from my guitar, the way my voice rips from my lungs whenever I sing the backing vocals; it's explosive. But despite everything, my eyes keep focusing on Gerard. It's the way he moves, hips swaying suggestively and hands motioning to make finger guns to his head and pull at his eyelids; he holds the mic like a knife, the cord twisted around his wrist menacingly, crying out into it with such ferocity you physically feel as if you're tearing apart in the best way just by being in the same room as him. Something registers with him onstage, I guess, because out of nowhere he's made the role of frontman his bitch. My hands keep playing the chords, keep slamming on the guitar, but I can't rip my eyes off of his act.

Eventually he turns to me, smirking as we enter the next song in our set. We've only got enough for a relatively short show as far as gigs go, but it doesn't matter; the room is on fire, and I can feel it licking at my limbs as I fall onto the stage and go into a headbanging frenzy, the chords still flowing out like nothing fucking happened. It's a drug, this is. I'm already addicted.

From the center of the stage, I see Gerard look back at me sprawled on the floor with my back arched, sweating my makeup down my face-- eyeliner is a good look, he's convinced me-- and lick his lips briefly.

_"All we are is bullets, I mean this--"_

The last few seconds of the show are so intense it's dizzying, and I'm still crouched over my guitar like a madman when the show lights go off and the main lights go on; that's our set. Just like that, I've floated through the whole thing on cloud nine, and I'm not about to be able to shake that off any time soon. I might just be this stupidly giddy for the next week.

"Frank."

"Frank, man, you okay?"

_"Frank."_

I snap out of the stupor, realizing I've managed to get up, but somehow ended up just standing here blankly watching my bandmates clear the set and start moving off the stage. Ray shakes my shoulder lightly, his hand flashing across my line of vision in an attempt to get me to come around.

"You look like you're about to pass out, dude," Ray says. I burst out laughing at this, a deep laugh from my gut, and I'm not entirely sure why. He just raises an eyebrow and pulls me backstage with the rest of them, shaking his head at my placebo insanity.

At nearly one in the morning and riding high on the adrenaline of our first show, there's no way we're in a state to drag our asses back to our respective homes. Instead Bob and Ray pulled together our funds to crash at the sketchy motel off the corner of the street; the same one everyone's band finds themselves at drinking beer they got from college students and annoying the hell out of the actual residents at all hours of the morning. This is how I find myself in a room that smells distinctly of pot and cat piss in the early hours of a late April Saturday, listening to Pete drunkenly cover Joy Division and Mikey taking requests for famous basslines. Haley records the whole thing on the ancient eight-millimeter she found in the flea market, a smile cracking across her face as she cements the footage of our little subculture. In ten years, I don't know how much of this I'm going to remember, but right now it feels like the meaning of life itself is lying across Gerard's lap, all of us tiredly watching Pete do a messy rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart.

I couldn't tell you what time it is for the life of me when Gerard and I stumble back to planet earth, heads still reeling from the show and the lights and the whole wide world, but I like to think we're somewhere in a time loophole, the minutes and seconds blurring together from our exhaustion but melting into content. The band decides to crash in a shitty motel that couldn't care less who's in what room or which rooms are even open, and for that I'm grateful. Maybe the follies of late capitalism have a few advantages after all.

I tell this newfound sociopolitical theory to Gerard, my voice obscured by my lips attached to his, and he just giggles. I silently thank him for not telling me how stupid my thinking aloud is right now. In the motel room, a painting of a landscape damn near mirrors the window, blacked out and dreamy.

"I love you," he breathes out when he finally stops keeling over from laughter.

I almost say _shut up_ , I really do, because that's something no parent and much less any boy has ever said to me. It's almost uncomfortable how alien it is. It nearly freaks me the fuck out; nearly.

"I love you too," I say, wishing I had something quirky to retort with before remembering this is a hotel room and this is Gerard, not a movie.

You can get me to name all of the Clash's records in chronological order by release year and what studio they were recorded in. You can ask me to recite the chord progressions of every Minor Threat song. I know the lyrics of anything Husker Du's put out by heart, and have the names of everyone who was ever anyone in punk rock-- Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, Paul Westerberg, Poly Styrene, a thousand more-- permanently ingrained in my head. But if you asked me about any of that right now, I wouldn't have a goddamn clue. I wouldn't know my own name.

Right now all I know is Gerard, right here, right now, and how I can hear my beating itself against my ribcage violently.

"You're the one thing keeping me sane, you know that, right?" My boyfriend says almost inaudibly.

I don't know what to say to this, so I just let myself keep being so happy I wonder if you could fucking die from it. 

Before I drift off I feel Gerard squeeze my hand, and I think that perhaps I'll find out.


	13. Left of the Dial

It passes like a tidal wave; we spend the early days of our last high school summer making music, hopping from show to show and soaking in a tiny but glorious spotlight.

The beauty of things here is that if you're a band with music and you have the balls to put yourself out there, odds are there's going to be friends in the scene willing to help you out. It's big enough of a local subculture to where not everyone may be family, but they care about you enough to go to your shows. And that counts for something.

You can tell that we're getting better, anyway. At first I was hesitant to believe it, tried my best to tell myself it was just beginner' luck and that the novelty of a new local band would die down pretty quickly, but the crowds didn't shrink. Our output didn't slow. Every time we went out in some humid basement or some creaking makeshift stage it was more adrenaline in the machine of us as a unit, as an real band with soon to be real aspirations. When we started out we had no intentions of even considering recording. We'd mess around, make some songs, play a few shows. But Hayley has an eight track recorder, and Pete has mics. We have an audience-- and enough money to fund more than just a few dozen seven inch copies.

"You're fucking mental," Bob says; we're gathered in Ray's house, a clean suburban two-story that could probably fit at least two of the rest of our houses in it. His parents have offered to slip us some cash to pay for a rag tag sort of tour around the northeast, something he's yet to tell anyone but Gerard. Gerard, of course, told me immediately. With almost two months left of summer, it's not impossible.

And Bob is right: it is mental. But it could also work, and if it's between figuring out how to get a job without a college degree and a shot at playing in some little punk band for a living, I already know what I've chosen.

"We've been a band for all of nine months. We've been playing shows for all of five months. And you wanna put out an EP?" he ventures.

Ray shrugs. "You wanna keep playing Minneapolis shows until people get bored of it? We can start moving out of our comfort zone, or never really see how far we can go. It's up to you."

"They'll be time for that later on."

"Will there? Why would we wait for when we have a window of opportunity now?"

Bob exhales dramatically; Mikey shoots me a look that tells me right away Gerard's let him in on the idea, too. At this rate, that could very well be moot point. I never would've thought Mikey would agree to the idea of putting sound to record anyway, if he hadn't outright voted in favor of it when this meeting began.

"Does it matter?" Bob asks. "Clearly I'm outnumbered here, it's not the end of the world. I'm just saying we be _careful_ before we bite off more than we can chew."

"It does matter. We want everyone here to comfortable with the decisions we make as a band. But I'm telling you right now, this isn't as impossible as you seem to think it is," Gerard adds. He eyes me expectantly.

"I don't see the hold up here," I say. "I'm in."

With a shake of his head, Bob sighs and tosses in an "I" with a skeptically raised hand. Ray jumps up.

"Well. Guess it's time to call up Hayley, isn't it?"

It takes all of an hour for things to be sorted out on that end, but Gerard keeps looking at me and Mikey, to which Mikey simply looks at me and Gerard, to which I just stare at Bob, who's staring at nothing but the drum kit he's meticulously adjusting in the adjacent room. Ray's still on the kitchen phone, having been directed to Pete by Hayley on the matter of equipment.

"Okay, someone's gotta say something. You heard Gee, we're not gonna be one of those bands that plans shit without everyone on board."

"We're not planning anything," Gerard shoots back. "In fact, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Frank, do you know what he's talking about?"

"What? Uh- oh. No, no I do not, Gerard. I have zero clue. Nobody had told me anything about anything. No touring. What? No--"

My boyfriend giggles, much to the frustration of his brother, who stands up.

"Guys."

"Mikey."

_"Gerard, will you shut up?"_

The older brother scoffs, to which younger glares. "Fine, I'll talk to Frank about this." Mikey turns to me. "So is Ray on crack or are we doing a tour?"

Now I've got both the brothers staring at me again like I'm the sole authority on Should Our High School Band Sleep In Ray's Van For Several Weeks Or Not.

"First of all, you're freaking me out with those stares. Secondly, I dunno. I'm the rhythm guitarist and I'm all of eighteen in a few months. I don't know how the semantics of a tour work, and I don't know shit about finances, but we're probably gonna all be broke by the end of it if we tried."

"Perfect. I like being broke and happy. That's what I do whenever I step into a record shop, anyway," Gerard quips.

"Guys, we literally just got Bob to agree to a 45 record. Let's not push it. Not now. I mean..."

"Do you wanna go on tour, Mikey?" Gerard asks bluntly.

"I mean. Well, yeah, of course I do. I've wanted to do that since I was old enough to know what a bass guitar was. But it's really, really fucking risky, Gee."

"Do you want to go on tour, Frank?"

I smirk at this. "It's a stupid idea and I love it. Yes."

"Then all we have to do is wait for Bob to come out of shock in a couple days and get this shit going. And yes. It's a stupid idea that I love, too."  
  
  


***  
  
  


My father is standing on the back porch, which is to say he's standing on a very small and gradually rotting wooden structure that once resembled a porch.

"Hey." I don't know, really, but I'm feeling generous. He must be too, because when he turns he gives me a small offering that looks a bit like a sad smile. I want to think it's genuine, but from the way he's leaning against the railing like it's another shoulder, I think he's been here long enough to calculate what he thinks sound like the right things to say.

"That's it? A 'hey' to your old man? Seems like I haven't seen you around the house in a solid week," he jokes.

"I'm very busy. Summer studying at the library. Noble community outreach. Church food drives, you know, that stuff."

He snorts. "Oh yeah. I assumed as much."

"Where's Mom?"

My father turns, a tangible guilt in his eye for a second before he returns to emotional limbo again. "Don't know. She's out."

"Well, no kidding--"

"Hey, now. Watch it. But no, I don't know where to. Just needed to get out, I guess."

"Dad?"

He turns with his whole figure this time, shifting on his feet and cocking an eyebrow at the name. I can only count a handful of times since childhood where I bother to say it out loud.

"Did you...do something?" I ask tentatively. I immediately regret it.

"It's always the assumption that it's me, isn't it? That I can't do anything right to goddamn save my life, is that it?" he snaps. "Yes. Yes, I did. And she won't have to worry about that anymore if I had my way, for fuck's sake, you know it?"

"Dad. Stop, you're--jesus christ, you're scaring me."

"That's my job. I'm here to be anyone's friend. I'm here to pay the bills, because _clearly_ she can't or she would've have bothered with me--"

"Dad, what did you _say_ to her?"

He looks me square in the eye, cheeks hollowed out and caving like some fun house mirror version of me in twenty years. I'm not actually scared of him. I figured out what was a threat and what wasn't years ago, and it was pretty clear he wasn't the former. The one thing he's consistently good at is disappointment, and once swallow that pill you realize he never has the guts to do anything. Maybe he'd yell hoarsely at me if he found out about my politics or call me a fag if he actually knew shit about who I am; maybe he'd tell me I have nowhere to go and no future and no grasp on what reality is. But I don't really care about what my future is, because if practicality is giving into a life anything like this and a head anything like his, then I'd content to burn out on my naivety till I'm dead from it.

"Nothing she doesn't already know. Anything I did coming back into this mess was for you. I had the stupidity to have a kid that I can't raise and she had the stupidity to find me in the first place. Said we'd call it even, now, wouldn't we?"

The man standing in front of me looks like he's peeling at the edges. A dark place inside me wants the frayed corners to just finish the job. 

"Whatever you do," I seethe back. "Whatever you do, I don't give a shit how it affects me, do you hear me? Whatever you fucking do. You do it for her, or you don't do it at all."

My father says nothing.  
  
  


***  
  
  
  


When I'm upset, I call Gerard. I don't know why I like to think about the impossible so much, but when you're pissed off there's something cathartic about scheming day dreamed getaway plans.

Sometimes it's about what we'll do if the band gets anywhere; other times it's about extremes like running away. Right now, it's just about where we'll go after we graduate.

"If I graduate," Gerard scoffs. "I don't want to talk about the hit my grades and credits took after junior year. Staying in your house for weeks at a time never fails to shake things up GPA wise, at least."

"Shut up. You're smart and you have the whole quiet art kid thing going so the teachers don't hate you. Between the two, you'll get by. As for me, I'm not entirely sure, but the idea is that I'll kill myself if I have to take senior year over, so it'll be a moot point."

"Frank...."

"Okay. Sure. We can be serious."

Gerard giggles in that soft way that hits you right in the heart, soaking in and fluttering inside your chest. It never gets old, not once. The only thing that could make it better is if it weren't over the phone line in this empty house, but I'll take what I can get.

"We'll get an apartment," he says dreamily. "Like, sure, it'll be small. Cracks in the walls. Maybe it'll have bats in the rafters, I dunno."

"Spooky."

"Uh-huh. And it'll have shit heating, so it'll get cold in the winter, which'll be fine because we'll just keep each other warm, right?"

"Watch it, Way. You're getting sappy on me again."

"You better believe I am, asshole. You make it easy."

With Gerard's voice on the other line I can forget that I'm leaning against the kitchen wall; I can pretend both my parents aren't dislocated in different places just to get away from each other; I can pretend that the things we talk about are realistic thoughts to have. It gets easier and easier to pretend, though; he's right. I guess I make it easy for him to forget some things, too. But the more he speaks every day the more real it feels.

"Gerard?"

"Yeah?" I can hear the sleepiness decorate his voice, gentle and tenor.

"I love you."

I don't freak out when he says it back this time. He makes it easy.


	14. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

My parents are on non-speaking terms again; my grades are almost as low as Gerard's, which are just enough to guarantee safety; and Bob somehow found out about us all gushing over a tour without him, so he's pissed at us, primarily Ray, who he is also on non speaking terms with at the moment.

But if nothing else, I am getting a diploma in two days. One completely weak, bottom of the class diploma because I've spent all three of my smoke filled brain cells on music for eighteen years, but at the end of the day it's a fucking diploma and I can say I did something right for once.

The preparations for graduation are some of the most pretentious and useless bits of bullshit I've been faced with: the gowns that look like someone threw some fake craft store silk together and called it eighty bucks, the way they insist this is the biggest occasion of your life like college graduation and having children and dying are second rate to leaving some public high school that hasn't been renovated since the fifties, the overall idea that we should give much of a shit beyond the relief of getting out. And as undoubtedly immature and stupid that sort of outlook sounds, I really couldn't care less. The only upside besides knowing it's just a few more days of government sanctioned hell is that every shithead is probably busying picking out their new graduation SUV with their parents or planning out their after parties, because they mostly leave us alone in the last few days of being high school students.

My mother insists she pays for the gown and all that bullshit for me; I keep telling her I'll do it, to which my father loudly agrees and starts arguing with my mother about how he does All The Work and Our Son Is A Man Now So Stop Babying Him and the like, getting them back into speaking terms that are most definitely worse than their cold shouldering. I can feel this latest living together stint coming to a head, but the worst thing would be to admit it to either of them. And as guilty as I feel about it, I don't really have the energy to care all that much anymore.

The one constant positive force in my life is Gerard; I am reminded of that when I go through my record box and he's left some of his vinyl over, or when he calls me or sneaks in through my bedroom window, swearing that some day he won't have to be sneaking into other peoples' houses just to make out with me.

And that's why graduation feel so anticlimactic: everything in my life is in a constant state of collective mess, music and this boy who has the power to crush my heart if he wanted to being the two exceptions. Even with that said, you can still see the worry in Gerard's expression sometimes, at the mention of the future or of things like parents and jobs and the point of all of them. And in a way, graduation really is anticlimactic. My father is working, not that I'd want him there anyway; the same goes for Gerard's parents, with only Mikey there in the audience with a little shy smile and a wave at the rest of us in the milling line of seniors. The diploma doesn't feel like anything but a rolled of sheet of paper with a plastic ribbon, which is what it is, and I didn't expect it to. It's not a key or something that relieves me; it's empty and light while I'm staring it down in my palm and walking down the steps of the platform in a daze. From the B section, Bob shoots me a look that I can't really decipher when I walk past, but says nothing.

I feel drained. In short, it's a very awkward, outside day at school.

"You ready to sell your soul to corporate America, guys?"

Hayley grins, wiggling the diploma between her fingers as the stadium files out; I can see Mikey heading towards us, wobbling from sitting so still for so long no doubt. My mother remains in her seat looking deeply out of place. Suddenly, a pair of arms go around me as Gerard pounces me with a hug; his younger brother eyes us curiously before he goes to greet Ray.

"He's not talking to me, guys. At all. He won't even look at me," Ray informs us.

"Bob? Jesus, does he really have that much of a stick up his ass about touring--" I counter, but he shakes his head quickly.

"It's not that. I mean, it stemmed from that, but then we got into a fight and it escalated, and I just-- I don't know. It's fucking graduation. I'm going to university; he's talked about moving to the Northwest since, like, forever. I don't know. I really don't. I can't forgive myself if this is going to be it with him. We've been friends since we were in middle school, you know?"

It occurs to me that Ray's about to actually cry. Hayley looks apologetic, not really knowing him well like we do, but also clearly uncomfortable. Gerard just pats his shoulder. "But we're graduating!" Ray adds in a weak attempt to lighten things up again, if they were really ever light with the intense dread of adulthood sort of hitting us in the face at the same time.

Bob sees us huddled together, sort of starts in our direction awkwardly; then leaves. I can't tell how many of us he's mad at or at least avoiding out of Ray being in our perimeter, but I don't suspect I'll be able to do anything about it. He needs space; maybe Ray does, too, even if he's doing his best to wave Bob over or even get his attention at all.

So as a result of all this, it ends up being just Gerard and I at the graduation party. It's sort of open to anyone, what with Pete, Ryan, and Hayley's group colliding with Gerard, Bob, and Ray's, despite the latter two remaining to be seen. I run into people I haven't talked to in what feels like years, like Bert, who I'm surprised even graduated with an attendance record like his. I see Lindsey who's grown out her hair and gotten an art scholarship, and her new boyfriend Adam who talks almost exclusively about how we need to check out his friend Jim's band's EP or something. Patrick's still got senior year to get through and Joe's freshly a sophomore now, but they're there, too, arranging the mixtapes for, as Patrick puts it, "the optimal Elvis-Costello-filled party soundtrack with enough Joy Division to keep Pete sedated." Or, as Joe calls it, "Patrick being a fucking dork and hogging the stereo."

The atmosphere is practically electric, enough to make you forget ever feeling isolated or cast out by society or even a little lonely, just for a few hours; but it's so palpable that your head'll start to buzz from it all, and so Gerard pulls me into the yard where it's marginally quieter. Some people drinking expired beer and smoking cigarettes (and other things that could get certain pigs called on us), very little else besides the Clash playing softly.

_If you say that you are mine_

_I'll be here 'til the end of time_

"Frank."

Gerard takes my face in his hands to look at him, giggling as we amble in the street stupidly, giddily, never mind the drizzling rain that's starting to pockmark our clothes.

"I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, and I want you to fucking promise me you know that, okay?"

"Gee, are you drunk? Seriously. Of course I love you--"

"No, no. I just. No matter what, I want you to know that _I_ love _you_."

His expression is wide eyed, worried. I hold onto his waist to steady him as he stumbles a little.

"Gerard? Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he mutters. "Yeah, I'm perfect." And he kisses me, all desperate grasps between the two of us to our hips and our arms and anywhere our hands can reach. We're far enough away from the party, no one who could see us from a distance in the dark paying attention; wrapped up in each other and blanking out. At least I am. The way he holds me is like he's gonna lose me; I feel like it's my responsibility to show him in this kiss that he's not, that I'm staying.

"I'm staying right here," I promise him when we finally break apart, and he gently pushes my bangs from my face, hazel eyes glinting in the dark and shining with something new.

"I know you are."

We end up going for a walk, the most impractical and unexplainable thing to do right now, but even in the ugly, rainy wash of the downtown outskirts the dilapidated neon signs for dry cleaners and fast food and supermarkets feel beautiful when they're reflecting onto his face. It's the only thing I can look at, the lights hitting his skin while he smiles shyly at my staring.

"You act like you've never seen me, Frank."

"Nah. You just get prettier to look at the more I do it, y'know. I'm saving a mental picture, here."

"For what?"

"I don't know. For whenever I need it. When I need you."

Gerard looks a little guilty, and I reassure him again that he doesn't need to be, but he shakes his head, changing the subject with the semblance of another smile, this one a little forced at first. Soon enough, though, I think I've gotten him back; we pass cigarettes between each other as we walk, tiptoeing on curbs with out arms outstretched childishly, giggling and stumbling into each other. I've never been in love before, so I don't have a single thing to compare this to, and it's perfect. He's a clean slate and he manages to fill it up with all these perfect little things, with just himself, and that alone is enough to wipe anything else from my mind.

We get more cigarettes from the gas station when we run out, laughing like middle schoolers about the only slightly morbid joke we'll be dead by our twenties. I'd be fine with being dead tomorrow if it meant this was the last memory I had, but I don't say that part aloud. The record shop, the bench sitting by the park no one bothers to upkeep or ever go to anymore, the minuscule few stars that remain after the glowing wash of the city lights are somehow inherently magic all because of this one boy.

It's just that: all these little things, all stemming from him, everything almost perfect just for a bit. Just a little; almost.

_"Hey."_

Gerard whips around suddenly, and I institutionally do the same and throw an arm out in front of him. This makes them laugh.

It's evident how drunk Jackson is right now, beer down the front of his shirt but not enough to keep him from getting a vice grip on my neck and shoving my forward with a force that practically knocks my lungs loose in their entirety. I try to get up; there's a foot on my chest, someone I recognize vaguely from school, a couple I don't. I can't make out faces to really discern who's who, anyway.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you get off to this or something?" I think I hear myself ask, but I get kicked in the nose right as the words come out, and the impact rings in my skull with the feeling of wet warmth seeping down my mouth and chin.

I want to scream something dumb, something obviously useless to Gerard like to run or to aim for the balls or stomach but right now I'm starting forget how to form words at all; I can hear snickering and then whimpering, a shriek, sounds I want more than anything to block out but I can hardly raise myself off the ground an inch; when I do, I earn another kick, this time the side of a sneaker hitting my ear and jaw.

"You fuckin' bastard," I spit out, finally, stupidly, hearing more laughter at this. Gerard hisses for me to shut up, which gets him nothing but shoved against the brick beside where I lay on the ground, shuddering and trying to process human thought again while my vision starts splintering.

"Happy goddamn graduation!" Jackson yells, cackling like this is the funniest joke he'll ever hear, eyes drunken and glassy but full of a very sober, very real animosity. They're the last thing, apart from the punch that flies to Gerard's jaw, that I see.

"You're gonna make a fucking idiot out of me, huh? _Huh?_ " Jackson shrieks, a twisted grin on his face but those eyes giving away some kind of broken want, regret, the same look I can see in my father and have no trouble recognizing now. He's face to face with his mistakes and all he can do is throw his fists to try and erase them. "Doesn't fucking matter now, faggot. Doesn't matter now." Whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

I want to kill them. I want to actually, truly, see them dead, see them never touch him again, the way the grovel for attention and entertainment and end up doing shit like this; I want them dead, and I think I may even voice that opinion before I black out-- I wouldn't know. I can't hear my own thoughts at this point, much less my own voice.

I just hear one thing, and that's Gerard choking out two words in my direction before he gets cut off again:

_"I'm sorry."_   
  


***  
  


Mikey stares at me, wide eyed and full of worry, much in the same way he did when we first met.

I'm getting real tired of the sort of things that come full circle for us.

He informs me that he's already called my mother to tell her I slept over, which she awkwardly okayed, given I just come and go without anyone every paying attention, and the last of her worries was where I'd be graduation night when she's got my father and all her unanswered applications to content with. For a brief second I want to see her face, or be held like a small child, and then the stark feeling disappears as quickly as it appeared.

I feel like my brain has caved in, with nothing but the atmosphere around me in my collection of thoughts, of memories; it's all there, it's all me, but it's gray around the edges until right now, a boy with his hands gripping the edge of the backboard until his knuckles are white while he slowly starts explaining things.

Gerard's room is where I've been laid to recover, and it's depressingly empty. It took me a minute to realize what that meant, and Mikey just looked deeply apologetic and scared all at once when he saw it click for me.

"He wanted to tell you, because it was gonna happen at some point. Some time soon, even. Just not...this soon, you know?" He inhales, shaking a little and a few stray tears leaking. "He just couldn't fucking take it, I guess. I mean. I can't-- I get it, I guess. But at the same time I don't."

"Mikey?" I ask. I am numb right now, not somehow not entirely shocked. All I can do is focus my attention on the kid trying not cry in front of me.

"Yeah?"

"You don't have to try to keep it together. It's okay. You're allowed to have feelings, y'know."

I don't really know where this comes from. I am lying in what I think is my boyfriend's bed, feeling like a collective broken bone, groggy and trying to figure out whether I'm going to throw up. But he needs someone to tell him that for once.

And he lets go a little, his hand clasped over his mouth and his eyes red and streaming tears into the dark circles under his eyes. I feel completely stupid, actually. This is his brother, after all. My problems are irrelevant in comparison to this, to a brother, to family, to the person who essentially raised him. And I want to figure this out for my own sake. I have the selfish, impractical desire to know more for my own sake because apparently I think a teenage relationship, the kind that are doomed from the start, is more important than seeing your big brother up and disappear.

But we don't. No one knows more, other than he packed his bags to go to what I can only assume is his east coast "escape plan", nothing but a fresh high school diploma and limited funds to his name. Mikey knows about New York; his parents don't, but once he's eighteen and graduated, he might as well not be any of their concern. I wonder if they'll be distraught at all when they find out he up and left them. Probably not. Their mother comes home tomorrow; I suppose she'll find out then, because Mikey stares out the windows like Gerard's just gonna fucking appear, right there in his scarf and record crate, smiling with his little teeth and bright eyes.

Ray calls; Bob doesn't answer any of ours, much less Ray's, and when he hears the news there's a long silence on the line. An exhale, and then the words, "So he actually did it then."

When he comes over he looks like he's trying to hide a fair amount of tears himself, but he does a better job of it; we sit there, talking under our breath in the kitchen like we're being watched. Whatever god may be doing that watching, I think, is a sick fucking bastard.

I still have the image from last night ingrained in my head. When I've collected my thoughts enough for it to reappear, clear and thick inside my chest, I have to excuse myself and find myself collapsing on the floor of his room, knees to torso, doing an awful goddamn job of keeping quiet while the sobs that had been taking their sweet time to build up finally hit me all at once.

Ray opens the door, he sees me, and sits down.

"I'm a fucking idiot," I gasp out.

Ray considers this, shaking his head.

"No, you're not. Why would you even say that?"

I laugh, bitter and full of venom. "I shouldn't have just let us walk around like giddy motherfuckers, out in the open like this town doesn't hate us. Look where it got us. Look where it fucking got _him."_

He extends an arm, pulling it around my shoulder into a sort of side hug while we're still huddled up on the floor like the dumbass I am for crawling onto it in the first place.

"Here's something about Gerard you may not... know so well. Not because he kept things from you, necessarily, but because he wanted to protect you somehow. I guess that's it. He wanted to keep the people he loved away from his demons, but I've known him for years. I knew him before Jackson, even. He was always dreaming about running, maybe not from anything, but towards all these ambitious and places he wanted to be. After...everything started happening, he had something to run from, I guess. He didn't care as much about what he wanted as he did what he thought would be best for everyone around him, and best for just fucking getting out. It was on his mind before last night; it was on his mind even before you came into his life."

"Well. He got out, I guess."

"I wouldn't be so fatalistic about it. Who knows where New York is gonna take him. It could be right back here, if things don't work out, you know."

"I-- you know what? I want them to work out, though. I want things to work out for him. And yet I'm fucking scared and depressed and even-- even angry about this. Less at him as much as everything around us. But he could've _told_ me," I mutter. "That's all. He could've just told me."

"I know," Ray whispers, staring across the room at the empty walls with guilt of his own evident. "I know."


	15. Here Comes a Regular

None of us write music anymore. I've gotten hired at the record shop working register, which takes up all my time that's not spent sleeping or checking the phone. We don't play it, either; The Rotting House finally shutters in June, taking seven years of rock and roll with it into the earth when they demolish that street of otherwise uninhabited buildings. None of us have the energy or desire to be a band without our frontman and best friend, particularly considering the circumstances of his leaving. In the weeks that follow, he calls Mikey once. He tells him very little.

I find myself staying with Ray most of the time; enough to move my stuff into his parents' house, finally giving up with the whole trying to stomach my parents' discourse 24/7 thing. I haven't played the acoustic guitar by my bed in the guest room since the winter, I realize, and I'm certainly not picking it up now.

Bob doesn't speak to any of us; I don't feel like trying to contact him. He and Ray have created some kind of shift that doesn't involve me or Mikey or Gerard, but at the same time it seems we're just pieces of that puzzle that fell apart for him. With a couple guitarists and a bassist, there wouldn't be much of a point in trying to be a band when the thought of replacing our friends with other people makes the three of us collectively feel ill.

I find myself, on the rare occasion I do have free time, going to a Patron Saint Of Liars show. Patrick seems as lively as ever behind the mic, Pete jumping around like a maniac, and for some reason-- despite me being the same age as them-- I feel old. I'm eighteen and I feel old, I scoff at myself. But I do. Just a few months ago I would've been on my knees across that stage, guitar in hand, just like Pete. Now it seems unfathomable. I feel empty; I feel tired, so I leave early and end up telling Pete I got sick when he calls to ask what happened.

"Do you think I should go to college?" Mikey asks me one day, taking a drag on a cigarette and coughing a little. He's picked up the unfortunate habit of his brother in the last month or so, and none of us really have the motivation to try and lambaste him for his coping mechanisms when most of us smoke like we're trying to be dead by the end of the week anyway. I want him to be safe; I want him to be okay. But none of us are, really.

This question is startling. For me, it was never an option. I didn't have the money, I knew nobody in my life family wise would be helping me out much less paying for it themselves if they even had the funds, either. I just didn't want to, I had told myself; and now as Mikey's asking this, I start to realize how fast adulthood hit without me even once considering it. Music degrees. Recording schools, something like Ray's doing. Shit like that, which is irrelevant to me now, but not to a fifteen-year-old waiting intently for me to provide some kind of advice his brother's not here to give him.

"I don't know know. Do you want to?" I finally say.

Mikey shrugs. "I've thought about schools. And stuff, you know. But it's not really super plausible, anyway."

"You're smart! Come on, you could totally go to college," Ray retorts, which is easy for him to say what with his recording and sound production degree being in the bag in a couple years from now.

This seems to provide Mikey some semblance of comfort, however; because for the first time in months I see a smile that doesn't have some kind of force or catch to it.

One night I'm coming home from work I get this intense wave of emotion, something so strong that I have to go behind the back of a half-barren strip of shops and shakily light several cigarettes in a row, trying to chain smoke the rawness of missing him out of my system while the same neon and street lamps shine down on the streets like a microscope.

I tell myself I am going to be okay, at least in the sense that functioning society wants me to be; I have a job, I will get an apartment, I will operate in the way a person should.

And I do. I start moving on, slowly, taking my savings into account and renting out my own apartment. I buy my groceries and I take out my earrings when one gets caught on the seam of the public bus seat, thinking they're too much to worry about at his point. I stop dying my hair from all the expense and work that comes from it. You learn quickly how minuscule things that you swore were testaments to your self expression seem when you're faced with a harsh dose of adult reality.

I feel emptier than I ever did while stranded out in misfit toy land in high school; more drained than I did at any point in my childhood with moving from house to apartment to house and father to no father; I don't have the time or energy to feel much as time goes on. It's almost merciful.

Sometimes I still think about things like bands, and being stupidly in love with someone, and how it feels just to hold a guitar in your hand and strum some chords. But whenever I try the last thing, it's just a shell of what it used to mean to me.

But it's okay. I can see Mikey getting better, recovering and going to parties and living the kind of high school dream I always scoffed at now that his harassers are gone from campus and everyone's forgotten about his weird brother. Ray's struggling with school, but he gets by, and sometimes we talk about it; about being tired, about growing up, about things we tell ourselves we don't miss but still do.

I can see the world falling into place, mundane and steady and every day, but whenever that scares me, I remind myself there's far worse positions to be in. I made it out. I survived. I'm living, hollowly, but living.

I suppose the final step of growing up is accepting this is what being okay is.


	16. Epilogue

I get the call late on a Friday night, one of the few times I can stop and breathe after working nonstop for the week and crashing into bed after my shifts. Mikey's clearly been back in contact with him, because he's got my new number.

"I think there's a lot I have to come clean about," he says, softly, not a trace of animosity or distance between us conveyed in his voice. I can't find the heart to have any of that harbored. I never have.

I put walls up between me and my memories of him, and I wrote him off as a teenage prerequisite that just came a little later in my teen years than most: complicated, born to fail, messy for everyone involved. For the sake of my sanity, I stopped fretting over how he was doing or whether he published any art or whether Brendon was a good friend to him or-- well, anything. I blocked him out, and all it takes is the sound of his voice to wipe all that hard work away. It's been more than a year, and I feel like that time's disappearing with that wall.

We decide to meet; if nothing else, just to clear the air. I don't know what he intends by this, but it's how I find myself sitting in a diner outside the First Avenue, the 7th street entry beginning to slowly fill with people, waiting to see Husker Du but at the same time, waiting for something else entirely.

I see him from the door; he's traded his trench coat and collection of scarves for a leather jacket and jeans, very scarce makeup if any at all; he's cut his hair, and in all of that he looks wildly different and yet utterly, warmly familiar. I came here convinced I would cry, despite all I did to move on. And yet when we sit down, I feel grounded by him being there.

Having the guts to take a shot in the dark and love some one is a fucking strange thing; and I think that never changed. I'm not complaining. We're awkward at first, trying not to talk over the other and giggling uncomfortably; and then it happens: we speak like we'd just spoken yesterday.

"How long did it take you to move on?" Gerard asks, quietly.

I'm not sure how to respond; I struggle with the words.

"Because I want to be completely, brutally honest here: I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, but I knew I had to do it. And I'm okay. I'm living the way I wanted to for years, even if it's not glamorous, even if it barely pays enough. The moment I left, I was scared as fuck, not so much for the future of my life, but because of us. Because of you. At that point in time, what I felt for you was so all-consuming, so overwhelming that it felt like I was running from the one thing that kept me moored. It was the hardest decision I had to make, and I couldn't face it again. I couldn't face you and tell you I chose to leave," he says.

"You didn't have to chose. I would've-- I understand. I understand why you did it. But I could've gone with you, I could've-- I don't know, Gerard. I don't know. But it happened. And it's okay now."

He nods, his coffee pressed to his lips somberly. I watch him drink it, wanting to soak in all these little familiar images of him again.

"I figured by now the damage was too elaborate. But I just had to at least try to make things a little right, you know?" he asks, softly. "I know you've moved on."

There are a number of words I could say in response to this; I could lie and say everything is okay now, which he wouldn't believe. I could lie and say my life is decent, all things considered. I could lie and say that what happened between us was overblown teenage affection, which is what I've been telling myself, but I know that isn't true, and I couldn't bear hurting someone that much to keep up a coping front. The words I want to say, the truth, are all that I am capable to letting go now.

"I don't think I have, Gerard."


End file.
